D. BIBLIOGRAFIE

a. Roman

Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale or The Edible Woman

Bellow, Saul: Humbold’s Gift or Seize The Day

Heller, Joseph: Catch 22

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day

Joyce, James: Ulysses

Lawrence, D. H.: Women in Love or The Rainbow

Lodge, David: Nice Work

Morrison, Toni: Beloved or Song of Solomon

Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita

Orwell, George: 1984 or Animal Farm

Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy

Updike, John: The Centaur or Rabbit, Run

b. Teatru

Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Beckett Samuel: Waiting for Godot

Pinter, Harold: The Caretaker

c. Poezie

Eliot, T. S. The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock; The Waste Land

Yeats, W. B. Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, The Second Coming

Bibliografie critică obligatorie

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel, Second edition, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1992

_____ The Modern British Novel, London: Secker and Warburg, 1993

Călinescu, Matei. Cele cinci feţe ale modernităţii, Bucureşti: Univers 1996

Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature 1969, vol. 4

Elliott, Emory (gen. ed.).The Columbia Literary History of the United

States, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988

Ford, Boris: The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, 1983, vol. 7 – 8

Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford Univ. Press

1994

Stevenson, Randall. The British Novel Since the Thirties. London: B. T. Batsford, 1986;

Iaşi: Institutul European, 1993.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE

Margaret Atwood

←Themes, Motifs & Symbols→

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Women’s Bodies as Political Instruments

Because Gilead was formed in response to the crisis caused by dramatically decreased birthrates, the state’s entire structure, with its religious trappings and rigid political hierarchy, is built around a single goal: control of reproduction. The state tackles the problem head-on by assuming complete control of women’s bodies through their political subjugation. Women cannot vote, hold property or jobs, read, or do anything else that might allow them to become subversive or independent and thereby undermine their husbands or the state.

Despite all of Gilead’s pro-women rhetoric, such subjugation creates a society in which women are treated as subhuman. They are reduced to their fertility, treated as nothing more than a set of ovaries and a womb. In one of the novel’s key scenes, Offred lies in the bath and reflects that, before Gilead, she considered her body an instrument of her desires; now, she is just a mound of flesh surrounding a womb that must be filled in order to make her useful. Gilead seeks to deprive women of their individuality in order to make them docile carriers of the next generation.

Language as a Tool of Power

Gilead creates an official vocabulary that ignores and warps reality in order to serve the needs of the new society’s elite. Having made it illegal for women to hold jobs, Gilead creates a system of titles.

Whereas men are defined by their military rank, women are defined solely by their gender roles as Wives, Handmaids, or Marthas. Stripping them of permanent individual names strips them of their individuality, or tries to. Feminists and deformed babies are treated as subhuman, denoted by the terms “Unwomen” and “Unbabies.” Blacks and Jews are defined by biblical terms (“Children of Ham” and “Sons of Jacob,” respectively) that set them apart from the rest of society, making their persecution easier. There are prescribed greetings for personal encounters, and to fail to offer the correct greetings is to fall under suspicion of disloyalty. Specially created terms define the rituals of Gilead, such as “Prayvaganzas,” “Salvagings,” and “Particicutions.” Dystopian novels about the dangers of totalitarian society frequently explore the connection between a state’s repression of its subjects and its perversion of language (“Newspeak” in George Orwell’s 1984 is the most famous example), and The Handmaid’s Tale carries on this tradition. Gilead maintains its control over women’s bodies by maintaining control over names.

The Causes of Complacency

In a totalitarian state, Atwood suggests, people will endure oppression willingly as long as they receive some slight amount of power or freedom. Offred remembers her mother saying that it is “truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.” Offred’s complacency after she begins her relationship with Nick shows the truth of this insight. Her situation restricts her horribly compared to the freedom her former life allowed, but her relationship with Nick allows her to reclaim the tiniest fragment of her former existence. The physical affection and companionship become compensation that make the restrictions almost bearable. Offred seems suddenly so content that she does not say yes when Ofglen asks her to gather information about the Commander.

Women in general support Gilead’s existence by willingly participating in it, serving as agents of the totalitarian state. While a woman like Serena Joy has no power in the world of men, she exercises authority within her own household and seems to delight in her tyranny over Offred. She jealously guards what little power she has and wields it eagerly. In a similar way, the women known as Aunts, especially Aunt Lydia, act as willing agents of the Gileadean state. They indoctrinate other women into the ruling ideology, keep a close eye out for rebellion, and generally serve the same function for Gilead that the Jewish police did under Nazi rule.

Atwood’s message is bleak. At the same time as she condemns Offred, Serena Joy, the Aunts, and even Moira for their complacency, she suggests that even if those women mustered strength and stopped complying, they would likely fail to make a difference. In Gilead the tiny rebellions of resistances do not necessarily matter. In the end, Offred escapes because of luck rather than resistance.

Motif

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Rape and Sexual Violence

Sexual violence, particularly against women, pervades The Handmaid’s Tale. The prevalence of rape and pornography in the pre-Gilead world justified to the founders their establishment of the new order. The Commander and the Aunts claim that women are better protected in Gilead, that they are treated with respect and kept safe from violence. Certainly, the official penalty for rape is terrible: in one scene, the Handmaids tear apart with their bare hands a supposed rapist (actually a member of the resistance). Yet, while Gilead claims to suppress sexual violence, it actually institutionalizes it, as we see at Jezebel’s, the club that provides the Commanders with a ready stable of prostitutes to service the male elite. Most important, sexual violence is apparent in the central institution of the novel, the Ceremony, which compels Handmaids to have sex with their Commanders.

Religious Terms Used for Political Purposes

Gilead is a theocracy—a government in which there is no separation between state and religion—and its official vocabulary incorporates religious terminology and biblical references. Domestic servants are called “Marthas” in reference to a domestic character in the New Testament; the local police are “Guardians of the Faith”; soldiers are “Angels”; and the Commanders are officially “Commanders of the Faithful.” All the stores have biblical names: Loaves and Fishes, All Flesh, Milk and Honey. Even the automobiles have biblical names like Behemoth, Whirlwind, and Chariot. Using religious terminology to describe people, ranks, and businesses whitewashes political skullduggery in pious language. It provides an ever-present reminder that the founders of Gilead insist they act on the authority of the Bible itself. Politics and religion sleep in the same bed in Gilead, where the slogan “God is a National Resource” predominates.

Similarities between Reactionary and Feminist Ideologies

Although The Handmaid’s Tale offers a specifically feminist critique of the reactionary attitudes toward women that hold sway in Gilead, Atwood occasionally draws similarities between the architects of Gilead and radical feminists such as Offred’s mother. Both groups claim to protect women from sexual violence, and both show themselves willing to restrict free speech in order to accomplish this goal. Offred recalls a scene in which her mother and other feminists burn porn magazines. Like the founders of Gilead, these feminists ban some expressions of sexuality. Gilead also uses the feminist rhetoric of female solidarity and “sisterhood” to its own advantage. These points of similarity imply the existence of a dark side of feminist rhetoric. Despite Atwood’s gentle criticism of the feminist left, her real target is the religious right.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The center of Gilead’s power, where Offred lives, is never explicitly identified, but a number of clues mark it as the town of Cambridge. Cambridge, its neighboring city of Boston, and Massachusetts as a whole were centers for America’s first religious and intolerant society—the Puritan New England of the seventeenth century. Atwood reminds us of this history with the ancient Puritan church that Offred and Ofglen visit early in the novel, which Gilead has turned into a museum. The choice of Cambridge as a setting symbolizes the direct link between the Puritans and their spiritual heirs in Gilead. Both groups dealt harshly with religious, sexual, or political deviation.

Harvard University

Gilead has transformed Harvard’s buildings into a detention center run by the Eyes, Gilead’s secret police. Bodies of executed dissidents hang from the Wall that runs around the college, and Salvagings (mass executions) take place in Harvard Yard, on the steps of the library. Harvard becomes a symbol of the inverted world that Gilead has created: a place that was founded to pursue knowledge and truth becomes a seat of oppression, torture, and the denial of every principle for which a university is supposed to stand.

The Handmaids’ Red Habits

The red color of the costumes worn by the Handmaids symbolizes fertility, which is the caste’s primary function. Red suggests the blood of the menstrual cycle and of childbirth. At the same time, however, red is also a traditional marker of sexual sin, hearkening back to the scarlet letter worn by the adulterous Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of Puritan ideology. While the Handmaids’ reproductive role supposedly finds its justification in the Bible, in some sense they commit adultery by having sex with their Commanders, who are married men. The wives, who often call the Handmaids sluts, feel the pain of this sanctioned adultery. The Handmaids’ red garments, then, also symbolize the ambiguous sinfulness of the Handmaids’ position in Gilead.

A Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a document on which old writing has been scratched out, often leaving traces, and new writing put in its place; it can also be a document consisting of many layers of writing simply piled one on top of another. Offred describes the Red Center as a palimpsest, but the word actually symbolizes all of Gilead. The old world has been erased and replaced, but only partially, by a new order. Remnants of the pre-Gilead days continue to infuse the new world.

The Eyes

The Eyes of God are Gilead’s secret police. Both their name and their insignia, a winged eye, symbolize the eternal watchfulness of God and the totalitarian state. In Gilead’s theocracy, the eye of God and of the state are assumed to be one and the same.

SEIZE THE DAY

Saul Bellow

←Themes, Motifs, and Symbols→

Themes

The Predicament of Modern Man

Seize the day is a reflection of the times in which it was written. The novel was written in a post-war world. WWII created several factors that serve as a backdrop to Wilhelm's isolation in the novel, an isolation that represents the feeling of many during the time period.

First and foremost, war creates dissolution and in many cases dislocation because of forced immigration. During the war many people, Jews especially, were escaping the Germans and, thus, fleeing, when they could. Also, American troop and other members of the alliance were disillusioned to see that such horrors could exist. Finally, and in opposition to the above, the war had a positive effect of creating an economic boom. There was also a surge in technological interest in America. The reasons for this serge are two-fold: America was rich and America was involved in a post-WWII cold war with the Soviet Union, since the countries competed technologically. It is in this world that a man like Tommy Wilhelm is lost.

Tommy is an idealist surrounded by the pressures of the outside world. He is isolated and, thus, is forced to turn inward. The urban landscape is the symbol that furthers his isolation, for he is always "alone in a crowd." Bellow wants the reader to understand this isolation and thus has almost the entire novel take place within Wilhelm's head. We experience the back and forth of uncertainty, the wavering of watery thoughts, the sadness and frustration of being that person that is "alone in the crowd."

This isolation and inner struggle is the predicament of modernity. Bellow would not be the only modern master to touch up the subject. For instance, T.S. Eliot had written The Wasteland in which he discusses many of the same subjects as Bellow, albeit in a very different fashion and style. Eliot discusses the "unreal city" which can be compared to the city that Wilhelm feels so uncomfortable within. Eliot also claims that there are many "dead" within the crowds. This symbolic death points to the fact that the modern man seems only to be going through the motions of things. Wilhelm, for instance, at the beginning of the novel, is like a character seemingly dead, both in appearance and in the way he claims he will simply go about the actions of his day. Other similarities between The

Wasteland and Seize the Day include the images of "drowning" and "water." Both writers used these images to illustrate a person drowning in life.

Seize the Day is not a regular day in the life of the modern man because it is a "day of reckoning," a day in which someone that is truly dead will give the protagonist a jolt of life. Unlike many modern masterpieces, Bellow has chosen a positive ending for his novel. He has also allowed his protagonist connections with the modern world. In Times Square, for example, Wilhelm had felt connected to the "larger body" of humanity. Furthermore, Bellow complicates the predicament of modernity by adding a very human and positive element. Bellow seems to be saying that the predicament of modern man goes far beyond the typical pessimism, cynicism, and isolation because it has the potential of reaching understanding and love.

The Internal Life of a Human Being

The critic Julius R. Raper, in an essay entitled "Running Contrary Ways," wrote that Saul Bellow's writing marked the end of a tradition of "close-mouthed straight-forwardness," a substituted it with "a confessional literature that feels no shame in being introspective and self indulgent." Bellow is not afraid to have his character talk about feeling and emotions. The way in which he achieves this shift from the sparse Hemingway style that had prevailed to his own is that he takes the reader "inside" the head and emotions of the characters. This shift in style was often called a shift from the "Gentile" literature that dominated to a more hyphenated American style. However, it is important to remember that although Bellow does address the subject of the Jewish-American, he had considered himself "American" writer, not a "Jewish" writer or a "Jewish-American" writer, perhaps because the immigrant experience is so much a part of America itself.

Moreover, the fact that Bellows moves the action inward helps achieve a stylistic feat. However, style is not its only achievement. This internal world becomes complicated and points to the complicated state of the human being. The device helps to outline the role of psychology in the novel, for instance and also helps to pose characters in concordance or dissonance with each other. For example, Wilhelm does not understand the inner life of his father and his thoughts, but he is attracted to the way in which the eccentric Dr. Tamkin thinks.

In short, the internal life of the protagonist allows Bellow to illustrate a world of wavering emotion that would not have been possible otherwise. Being inside the protagonist places the reader in the same position. It gives the reader an understanding of the problems Wilhelm faces, what makes him angry, what makes him frustrated, sad, and lonely. Therefore, throughout the book, the reader has accompanied Wilhelm in his frustrations and in his burdened feelings. In the end, we are also released and reborn in much the same way as Tommy. The reason is both because of literary catharsis and also because the reader has been following Tommy and has no other choice but to join him.

Motifs

Psychology

Throughout the entire novel, the idea of psychology is present as both an illuminating force and one that is to be mocked. Bellow presents this motif through both the characters' names, because they are all the names of famous psychologists, and through the character of Dr. Tamkin, the self-professed psychologist. Furthermore, one of the biggest struggles in the novel is a Freudian one: the Oedipal hatred Tommy holds for his father. However, the character that personifies Bellow's commentary on psychology is Dr. Tamkin.

Dr. Tamkin is both a character that, like the motif of psychology itself, serves as the perfect subject of parody and capable of illumination and truth. He talks about the conflict between the true soul and the pretender soul that is burdened by the forces and demands of the outside world. Bellow does seriously address the issues of the internal world of the human being. However, because Bellow makes fun of Tamkin constantly, it is important to remember that the field of psychology is a part of that problematic "external" world.

Naturalism (the animal)

Almost every chapter in the novel has an animalistic reference. Tommy calls both himself and his father an ass, a bear, and other names. Tommy was also once called "Velvel," by his grandfather (Velvel means wolf). This motif serves many purposes. It may serve to illustrate man's animalist natural tendencies and the internal instincts of a person. It may serve also to show the struggle between naturalism and the mechanical world, a topic that is satirized in Tamkin's poem. And, it may be taken one reference at a time. For example, the fact that Tommy had been called "wolf" can point to his loneliness and his need to "howl."

The City (The Urban Landscape)

The city serves to create the background of crowds and technology in Tommy's world. It serves to illustrate his disjunction with the outside/external world, the world that surrounds him. The city is mentioned at many points throughout the novel: Tommy is constantly claiming his hatred toward it. He would much rather live in the country, as he is unaccustomed to it. However, there are moments when he finds himself at one with the crowds of the city. Thus, this urban landscape can both serve as the dark backdrop of Tommy's life, the very symbol of what he is trying to escape, or it can be a force that allows him to feel solidarity with his fellow man.

Symbols

Water

Water is one of the most important symbols in the book. It is present in every chapter and serves different purposes at different points in the novel. Water because it can be both an unstable element

as well as a dangerous one, is used by Bellow to show that his protagonist is seemingly drowning. Water is also unstable and, thus, all of the water imagery points to the fact that nothing is certain and that Wilhelm lives in this world of uncertainty. The "water" is present from the beginning when Tommy seems to be descending into an underwater world that suffocates him. However, in the end, the water turns into a beautiful symbol of rebirth. The tears Tommy cries are tears that, ironically, bring him out of his drowning state.

Clothing

Clothes are pointed to throughout the novel in the descriptions of characters. It appears as a symbol from the beginning when Tommy is discussing clothing with Rubin, the newspaperman at the hotel, they talk about the clothes they are wearing. This is important because it points to the significance of appearances in the novel. Tommy is constantly putting on "layers," trying out roles and is constantly trying to conceal his true self.

Olive

Olive is the woman that Tommy loves. She is the woman he wants to marry but cannot because his wife will not grant him a divorce. His thoughts are constantly drifting toward he and his need for her is shown to the reader by the end of the novel. She signifies love, therefore. The importance of her name is what makes her a "symbol." The name Olive can refer to the symbolic Olive tree that signifies peace. Moreover, this would mean that it is "love," in the end is what brings "peace."

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Kazuo Ishiguro

As Salman Rushdie comments, The Remains of the Day is "a story both beautiful and cruel." It is a story primarily about regret: throughout his life, Stevens puts his absolute trust and devotion in a man who makes drastic mistakes. In the totality of his professional commitment, Stevens fails to pursue the one woman with whom he could have had a fulfilling and loving relationship. His prim mask of formality cuts him off from intimacy, companionship, and understanding.

←Themes, Motifs, and Symbols→

Themes

Dignity and Greatness

The compound qualities of "dignity" and "greatness" pervade Stevens's thoughts throughout The Remains of the Day. Early in the novel, Stevens discusses the qualities that make a butler "great," claiming that "dignity" is the essential ingredient of greatness. He illustrates the concept with a number of examples, finally concluding that dignity "has to do crucially with a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits." Stevens develops this exclusively professional mindset

only too well. Because he always dons the mask of an imperturbable butler, he necessarily denies—and therefore leaves unexpressed—his own personal feelings and beliefs. Stevens's pursuit of dignity in his professional life completely takes over his personal life as well. By suppressing his individuality in this manner, he never achieves true intimacy with another person. The fact that his view of dignity is so misguided is sad; we can tell that Stevens has wanted great things, but that he has gone about attaining them the wrong way.

Regret

Although Stevens never overtly discusses what he thinks "regret" may mean, it becomes clear, when he breaks down and cries at the end of the novel, that he wishes he had acted differently with regard to Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington. The tone of the novel is often wistful or nostalgic for the past; as the story goes on, the tone deepens into one of regret as Stevens reevaluates his past actions and decisions, and finds them unwise. Miss Kenton also openly says at the end of the novel that she often regrets the choices she has made in her own life. The overwhelming sadness of the ending is only slightly lifted by Stevens's resolve to perfect the art of bantering—it seems a meager consolation considering the irreparable losses he has experienced in life.

Loss

Literal and figurative loss abounds for almost every character in The Remains of the Day. Stevens loses his father, Miss Kenton, and eventually his hope of convincing Miss Kenton to return to Darlington Hall. Miss Kenton loses her aunt, her only relative; and loses Stevens when she leaves to marry a man she does not love. Lord Darlington loses two friends, Herr Bremann and Sir David Cardinal, and his godson, Reginald Cardinal, when they die. Furthermore, Darlington loses his reputation and some degree of his own sanity by the end of his life. Reginald Cardinal loses his father to death and his godfather, Lord Darlington, to Nazi brainwashing. There are both literal and figurative deaths: deaths of loved ones, and figurative deaths of dreams and ideals.

Motifs

Bantering

Bantering provides an element of lightness and humor in the narrative, yet it is still one that ultimately demonstrates the degree to which Stevens has become an anachronism. Stevens repeatedly tells of various failed attempts at bantering, and muses over why Americans like his new employer, Mr. Farraday, like to speak in such a casual and seemingly meaningless manner. By the end of the novel, Stevens cedes that perhaps bantering can be a way to exhibit warmth, and he resolves to try again with renewed zeal. The fact that Stevens uses the word "bantering" instead of "joking around" or "sense of humor" in itself shows how old-fashioned and formal he is.

Stevens's Rhetorical Manner

A recurrent structural motif in the novel is the rhetorical method Stevens uses to make his points. His primary manner of discussing a new topic is to pose a question and then answer it himself, incorporating into his answers a number of responses to anticipated counter-arguments. As rhetoric is a form of art and debate closely associated with England, this mode of discourse lends the novel greater authority as one firmly grounded in English culture and tradition. The rhetorical mode of discourse is intended to convince its audience; indeed, particularly in the early parts of the narrative, Stevens often succeeds in conveying the illusion that he fully understands all sides of the issues he discusses. As the novel progresses, however, we realize there are whole realms he has failed to consider, rendering many of his assumptions and arguments much weaker than they initially appear.

Symbols

The English Landscape

The most notable symbols in The Remains of the Day are associated with people and events, not with objects and colors. The English landscape that Stevens admires near the beginning of his road trip is one such significant symbol, as we see that Stevens applies the same standards of greatness to the landscape as he does to himself. He feels that English landscape is beautiful due to its restraint, calm, and lack of spectacle—the same qualities Stevens successfully cultivates in his own life as a butler aspiring to "greatness." By the end of the novel, however, Stevens is no longer certain that he has been wise to adhere to these values so rigidly, to the exclusion open- mindedness, individuality, and love.

Stevens's Father Searching on the Steps

Stevens and Miss Kenton watch Stevens's father, after his fall on the steps, practicing going up and down the steps. The elder Stevens searches the ground surrounding the steps "as though," Miss Kenton writes in her letter, "he hoped to find some precious jewel he had dropped there." The action of searching for something that is irretrievably lost is an apt symbol for Stevens's road trip, and indeed his life as a whole. Just as his father keeps his eyes trained on the ground, Stevens keeps thinking over memories in his head as though they will give him some clue as to how his values led him astray in life.

Giffen and Co.

The silver polish company in Mursden that is closing down is a symbol for the obsolescence of Stevens's profession. Indeed, the butler is also almost entirely obsolete by 1956. It is significant that Stevens knows all about the quality of the silver polish, the houses in which it was used, and so on—though he knows an incredible amount of detail about all things related to the maintenance of a great household, his knowledge is no longer nearly as important as it once was. There is no longer the demand that there once was in England for either silver polish or butlers; they are a part of a bygone era.

CATCH-22

Joseph Heller

←Themes, Motifs & Symbols→

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Absolute Power of Bureaucracy

One of the most terrifying aspects of Catch-22 is the fact that the lives and deaths of the men in Yossarian’s squadron are governed not by their own decisions concerning dangerous risks but by the decisions of an impersonal, frightening bureaucracy. The men must risk their lives even when they know that their missions are useless, as when they are forced to keep flying combat missions late in the novel even after they learn that the Allies have essentially won the war. The bureaucrats are absolutely deaf to any attempts that the men make to reason with them logically; they defy logic at every turn. Major Major, for example, will see people in his office only when he is not there, and Doc Daneeka won’t ground Yossarian for insanity because Yossarian’s desire to be grounded reveals that he must be sane.

Several scenes of interrogation add to the bureaucracy’s frustrating refusal to listen to reason. In one such scene, Scheisskopf interrogates Clevinger but will not let Clevinger state his innocence because he is too busy correcting Clevinger’s way of speaking. In another such scene, the chaplain is taken into a cellar and accused of a crime, but the men interrogating him do not know what the crime is—they hope to find out by interrogating him. In these and other instances, Yossarian’s companions learn that what they do and say has very little effect on what happens to them. All they can do is learn to navigate their way through the bureaucracy, using its illogical rules to their own advantage whenever possible.

Loss of Religious Faith

Even the chaplain begins to doubt his faith in God by the end of Catch-22. His disillusionment stems in part from Colonel Cathcart’s constant attempts to use the outward manifestations of religion to further his own ambition. Heller’s treatment of the subject of God is most focused in the Thanksgiving discussion between Yossarian and Scheisskopf’s wife. Both are atheists: Mrs. Scheisskopf does not believe in a just and loving God, whereas the God in whom Yossarian does not believe is a bumbling fool. Yossarian points out that no truly good, omniscient God would have created phlegm and tooth decay, let alone human suffering. Yossarian has experienced so many terrible things that he cannot believe in a God who would create such a wide array of options when it comes to pain and death. But the loss of faith in God does not mean a world without morals for the characters. Instead, it means a world in which each man must make his own morals—as Yossarian does when he chooses to desert the army rather than betray his squadron.

The Impotence of Language

In the first chapter of Catch-22, we see Yossarian randomly deleting words from the letters that he is required to censor while he is in the hospital. At first, this act seems terrible: the letters are the men’s only way of communicating with loved ones at home, and Yossarian is destroying that line of communication. As we learn more about Yossarian’s world, however, we see that the military bureaucracy has taken the communicative power out of language. As Snowden dies in the back of the plane, all that Yossarian can think of to say is “there, there,” over and over. He knows his words have no power to comfort Snowden, but he does not know what else to do. Faced with the realities of death and the absurdity of its circumstances, language seems unable to communicate any sort of reassurance.

While language has no power to comfort in the novel, it does have the power to circumvent logic and trap the squadron in an inescapable prison of bureaucracy. Catch-22 itself is nothing but a bunch of words strung together to circumvent logic and keep Yossarian flying missions. Catch-22 even contains a clause that makes it illegal to read Catch-22, demonstrating how absolutely powerful the concept of Catch-22 is. Yossarian knows that since it is nothing but words, Catch-22 does not really exist, but within the framework of the bureaucratic military, he has no choice but to accept the illogical prison in which these words place him.

The Inevitability of Death

Yossarian’s one goal—to stay alive or die trying—is based on the assumption that he must ultimately fail. He believes that Snowden’s gory death revealed a secret: that man is, ultimately, garbage. The specter of death haunts Yossarian constantly, in forms ranging from the dead man in his tent to his memories of Snowden. Furthermore, Yossarian is always visualizing his own death and is absolutely flabbergasted by the total number of ways in which it is possible for a human being to die. But Yossarian’s awareness of the inevitability of death is not entirely negative: it gives him a sense of how precious life is, after all, and he vows to live for as long as possible. He also lives more fully than he would without his constant consciousness of life’s frailty. He falls in love constantly and passionately, and he laments every second that he cannot spend enjoying the good things in the world.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Catch-22

One version of Catch-22 keeps Yossarian flying combat mission after combat mission: Doc Daneeka cannot ground him for insanity unless he asks, but if he asks to be grounded, then he must be sane. In this sense, Catch-22 is a piece of circular reasoning that keeps Yossarian trapped in a paradox that determines whether he lives or dies, even though it is made only of words. But Catch-22 has many other permutations, most notably in the final, general principle stated by the old Italian woman in

the ruined brothel: “they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” This description of Catch-22 proves what Yossarian has known all along: Catch-22 does not really exist. It is just a name made up for an illogical argument that justifies what is really going on. Behind Catch-22 stands an unswerving principle: might makes right.

Catch-22 also manifests itself even when it is not explicitly named. Both the doctor and the chaplain have been caught up in their own versions of Catch-22, since war drastically undermines the premises of their professions and yet calls upon them to practice those professions in the name of war. Even Heller’s style is in a way a Catch-22; the dialogue leaps haphazardly from one comment to another, often arriving at a point exactly opposite of that which the person speaking is trying to express.

Number of Missions

Colonel Cathcart wants to be promoted to general; to gain promotion, he constantly raises the number of missions that the men are required to fly before they can be discharged. The number of missions increases as time goes on, providing us with one of the few ways we have of keeping track of the chronology of Catch-22. The number of missions is also the primary trap from which the men in the squadron are unable to escape: each time Hungry Joe completes his missions or Yossarian comes near completing them, the number is raised yet again. The utter futility of trying to get out of the system the honest way, by flying the required number of missions, is what prompts Orr and Yossarian to seek alternative methods of escape.

Washington Irving

First signed as a forgery by Yossarian in the hospital, the name Washington Irving (or Irving Washington) is soon adopted by Major Major, who signs the name because the paperwork with Irving’s name on it never comes back to him. Washington Irving is a figment of the imagination who is, in a sense, the perfect person to deal with bureaucracy: because he does not exist, he is ideally suited to the meaningless shuffle of paperwork.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Chocolate-Covered Cotton

Aided by Yossarian, Milo comes up with the idea of selling chocolate-covered cotton to the government after he discovers that there is a glut of cotton in the market and that he cannot sell his own cotton. Milo’s product hides the lack of substance beneath an enticing exterior, showing the way in which bureaucracy can be fooled by appearances and is unable to measure actual substance or real merit.

The Soldier in White

The soldier in white, a bandage-wrapped, faceless, nameless body that lies in the hospital in the first chapter of the novel, represents the way the army treats men as interchangeable objects. When, months after his death, he is replaced by another, identical soldier in white, everyone assumes it is the same person.

Aerial Photographs

When the men go on bombing missions, they often later learn that the real purpose of the mission was either to make an explosion that would be beautiful when it showed up on aerial photographs or to clear out foliage so that better aerial photography will be possible. The photographs themselves, then, stand for the way in which the dehumanization of war—in this case, the detachment of the upper levels of military bureaucracy from the tragedy of war—allows for its horrors to be seen merely for their aesthetic effects.

ULYSSES

James Joyce

Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914, and when World War I broke out he moved his family to Zurich, Switzerland, where he continued work on the novel.

Ulysses has become particularly famous for Joyce’s stylistic innovations. In Portrait, Joyce first attempted the technique of interior monologue, or stream-of-consciousness. He also experimented with shifting style—the narrative voice of Portrait changes stylistically as Stephen matures. In Ulysses, Joyce uses interior monologue extensively, and instead of employing one narrative voice, Joyce radically shifts narrative style with each new episode of the novel.

Like Eliot and many other Modernist writers, Joyce wrote in self-imposed exile in cosmopolitan Europe. In spite of this fact, all of his work is strongly tied to Irish political and cultural history, and Ulysses must also be seen in an Irish context. Joyce’s novel was written during the years of the Irish bid for independence from Britain. After a bloody civil war, the Irish Free State was officially formed—during the same year that Ulysses was published. Even in 1904, Ireland had experienced the failure of several home rule bills that would have granted the island a measure of political independence within Great Britain. The failure of these bills is linked to the downfall of the Irish member of Parliament, Charles Stewart Parnell, who was once referred to as “Ireland’s Uncrowned King,” and was publicly persecuted by the Irish church and people in 1889 for conducting a long-term affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea. Joyce saw this persecution as an hypocritical betrayal by the Irish that ruined Ireland’s chances for a peaceful independence.

Accordingly, Ulysses depicts the Irish citizens of 1904, especially Stephen Dedalus, as involved in tangled conceptions of their own Irishness, and complex relationships with various authorities and

institutions specific to their time and place: the British empire, Irish nationalism, the Roman Catholic church, and the Irish Literary Revival.

←Themes, Motifs & Symbols→

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Quest for Paternity

At its most basic level, Ulysses is a book about Stephen’s search for a symbolic father and Bloom’s search for a son. In this respect, the plot of Ulysses parallels Telemachus’s search for Odysseus, and vice versa, in The Odyssey. Bloom’s search for a son stems at least in part from his need to reinforce his identity and heritage through progeny. Stephen already has a biological father, Simon Dedalus, but considers him a father only in “flesh.” Stephen feels that his own ability to mature and become a father himself (of art or children) is restricted by Simon’s criticism and lack of understanding. Thus Stephen’s search involves finding a symbolic father who will, in turn, allow Stephen himself to be a father. Both men, in truth, are searching for paternity as a way to reinforce their own identities.

Stephen is more conscious of his quest for paternity than Bloom, and he mentally recurs to several important motifs with which to understand paternity. Stephen’s thinking about the Holy Trinity involves, on the one hand, Church doctrines that uphold the unity of the Father and the Son and, on the other hand, the writings of heretics that challenge this doctrine by arguing that God created the rest of the Trinity, concluding that each subsequent creation is inherently different. Stephen’s second motif involves his Hamlet theory, which seeks to prove that Shakespeare represented himself through the ghost-father in Hamlet, but also—through his translation of his life into art—became the father of his own father, of his life, and “of all his race.” The Holy Trinity and Hamlet motifs reinforce our sense of Stephen’s and Bloom’s parallel quests for paternity. These quests seem to end in Bloom’s kitchen, with Bloom recognizing “the future” in Stephen and Stephen recognizing “the past” in Bloom. Though united as father and son in this moment, the men will soon part ways, and their paternity quests will undoubtedly continue, for Ulysses demonstrates that the quest for paternity is a search for a lasting manifestation of self.

The Remorse of Conscience

The phrase agenbite of inwit, a religious term meaning “remorse of conscience,” comes to Stephen’s mind again and again in Ulysses. Stephen associates the phrase with his guilt over his mother’s death—he suspects that he may have killed her by refusing to kneel and pray at her sickbed when she asked. The theme of remorse runs through Ulysses to address the feelings associated with modern breaks with family and tradition. Bloom, too, has guilty feelings about his father because he no longer observes certain traditions his father observed, such as keeping kosher. Episode Fifteen, “Circe,” dramatizes this remorse as Bloom’s “Sins of the Past” rise up and confront him one by one.

Ulysses juxtaposes characters who experience remorse with characters who do not, such as Buck Mulligan, who shamelessly refers to Stephen’s mother as “beastly dead,” and Simon Dedalus, who mourns his late wife but does not regret his treatment of her. Though remorse of conscience can have a repressive, paralyzing effect, as in Stephen’s case, it is also vaguely positive. A self-conscious awareness of the past, even the sins of the past, helps constitute an individual as an ethical being in the present.

Compassion as Heroic

In nearly all senses, the notion of Leopold Bloom as an epic hero is laughable—his job, talents, family relations, public relations, and private actions all suggest his utter ordinariness. It is only Bloom’s extraordinary capacity for sympathy and compassion that allows him an unironic heroism in the course of the novel. Bloom’s fluid ability to empathize with such a wide variety of beings—cats, birds, dogs, dead men, vicious men, blind men, old ladies, a woman in labor, the poor, and so on—is the modern-day equivalent to Odysseus’s capacity to adapt to a wide variety of challenges. Bloom’s compassion often dictates the course of his day and the novel, as when he stops at the river Liffey to feed the gulls or at the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy. There is a network of symbols in Ulysses that present Bloom as Ireland’s savior, and his message is, at a basic level, to “love.” He is juxtaposed with Stephen, who would also be Ireland’s savior but is lacking in compassion. Bloom returns home, faces evidence of his cuckold status, and slays his competition—not with arrows, but with a refocused perspective that is available only through his fluid capacity for empathy.

Parallax, or the Need for Multiple Perspectives

Parallax is an astronomical term that Bloom encounters in his reading and that arises repeatedly through the course of the novel. It refers to the difference of position of one object when seen from two different vantage points. These differing viewpoints can be collated to better approximate the position of the object. As a novel, Ulysses uses a similar tactic. Three main characters—Stephen, Bloom, and Molly—and a subset of narrative techniques that affect our perception of events and characters combine to demonstrate the fallibility of one single perspective. Our understanding of particular characters and events must be continually revised as we consider further perspectives. The most obvious example is Molly’s past love life. Though we can construct a judgment of Molly as a loose woman from the testimonies of various characters in the novel—Bloom, Lenehan, Dixon, and so on—this judgment must be revised with the integration of Molly’s own final testimony.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Lightness and Darkness

The traditional associations of light with good and dark with bad are upended in Ulysses, in which the two protagonists are dressed in mourning black, and the more menacing characters are associated with light and brightness. This reversal arises in part as a reaction to Mr. Deasy’s anti-Semitic judgment that Jews have “sinned against the light.” Deasy himself is associated with the brightness of coins, representing wealth without spirituality. “Blazes” Boylan, Bloom’s nemesis, is associated with brightness through his name and his flashy behavior, again suggesting surface without substance. Bloom’s and Stephen’s dark colors suggest a variety of associations: Jewishness, anarchy, outsider/wanderer status. Furthermore, Throwaway, the “dark horse,” wins the Gold Cup Horserace.

The Home Usurped

While Odysseus is away from Ithaca in The Odyssey, his household is usurped by would-be suitors of his wife, Penelope. This motif translates directly to Ulysses and provides a connection between Stephen and Bloom. Stephen pays the rent for the Martello tower, where he, Buck, and Haines are staying. Buck’s demand of the house key is thus a usurpation of Stephen’s household rights, and Stephen recognizes this and refuses to return to the tower. Stephen mentally dramatizes this usurpation as a replay of Claudius’s usurpation of Gertrude and the throne in Hamlet. Meanwhile, Bloom’s home has been usurped by Blazes Boylan, who comes and goes at will and has sex with Molly in Bloom’s absence. Stephen’s and Bloom’s lack of house keys throughout Ulysses symbolizes these usurpations.

The East

The motif of the East appears mainly in Bloom’s thoughts. For Bloom, the East is a place of exoticism, representing the promise of a paradisiacal existence. Bloom’s hazy conception of this faraway land arises from a network of connections: the planter’s companies (such as Agendeth Netaim), which suggest newly fertile and potentially profitable homes; Zionist movements for a homeland; Molly and her childhood in Gibraltar; narcotics; and erotics. For Bloom and the reader, the East becomes the imaginative space where hopes can be realized. The only place where Molly, Stephen, and Bloom all meet is in their parallel dreams of each other the night before, dreams that seem to be set in an Eastern locale.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Plumtree’s Potted Meat

In Episode Five, Bloom reads an ad in his newspaper: “What is home without / Plumtree’s Potted Meat? / Incomplete. / With it an abode of bliss.” Bloom’s conscious reaction is his belief that the ad is poorly placed—directly below the obituaries, suggesting an infelicitous relation between dead bodies

and “potted meat.” On a subconscious level, however, the figure of Plumtree’s Potted Meat comes to stand for Bloom’s anxieties about Boylan’s usurpation of his wife and home. The image of meat inside a pot crudely suggests the sexual relation between Boylan and Molly. The wording of the ad further suggests, less concretely, Bloom’s masculine anxieties—he worries that he is not the head of an “abode of bliss” but rather a servant in a home “incomplete.” The connection between Plumtree’s meat and Bloom’s anxieties about Molly’s unhappiness and infidelity is driven home when Bloom finds crumbs of the potted meat that Boylan and Molly shared earlier in his own bed.

The Gold Cup Horserace

The afternoon’s Gold Cup Horserace and the bets placed on it provide much of the public drama in Ulysses, though it happens offstage. In Episode Five, Bantam Lyons mistakenly thinks that Bloom has tipped him off to the horse “Throwaway,” the dark horse with a long-shot chance. “Throwaway” does end up winning the race, notably ousting “Sceptre,” the horse with the phallic name, on which Lenehan and Boylan have bet. This underdog victory represents Bloom’s eventual unshowy triumph over Boylan, to win the “Gold Cup” of Molly’s heart.

Stephen’s Latin Quarter Hat

Stephen deliberately conceives of his Latin Quarter hat as a symbol. The Latin Quarter is a student district in Paris, and Stephen hopes to suggest his exiled, anti-establishment status while back in Ireland. He also refers to the hat as his “Hamlet hat,” tipping us off to the intentional brooding and artistic connotations of the head gear. Yet Stephen cannot always control his own hat as a symbol, especially in the eyes of others. Through the eyes of others, it comes to signify Stephen’s mock priest-liness and provinciality.

Bloom’s Potato Talisman

In Episode Fifteen, Bloom’s potato functions like Odysseus’s use of “moly” in Circe’s den—it serves to protect him from enchantment, enchantments to which Bloom succumbs when he briefly gives it over to Zoe Higgins. The potato, old and shriveled now, is an heirloom from Bloom’s mother, Ellen. As an organic product that is both fruit and root but is now shriveled, it gestures toward Bloom’s anxieties about fertility and his family line. Most important, however, is the potato’s connection to Ireland—Bloom’s potato talisman stands for his frequently overlooked maternal Irish heritage.

The Rainbow

The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family living in Nottinghamshire,[2] particularly focusing on the individual's struggle to growth and fulfilment within the confining strictures of English social life.

Plot[edit]

The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, a farm/ labouring dynasty who live in the East Midlands of England near Nottingham. The book spans a period of roughly 65 years from the 1840s to 1905, and shows how the love relationships of the Brangwens change against the backdrop of the increasing industrialisation of Britain. The first central character, Tom Brangwen, is a farmer whose experience of the world does not stretch beyond Nottinghamshire; while the last, Ursula, his granddaughter, studies at University and becomes a teacher in the progressively urbanised, capitalist and industrial world that would become our modern experience.

The book starts with a description of the Brangwen dynasty, then deals with how Tom Brangwen, one of several brothers, fell in love with a Polish refugee, Lydia. The next part of the book deals with Lydia's daughter by her first husband, Anna, and her destructive, battle-riven relationship with her husband, Will, the son of one of Tom's brothers. The last and most extended part of the book, and also probably the most famous, then deals with Will and Anna's daughter, Ursula, and her struggle to find fulfilment for her passionate, spiritual and sensual nature against the confines of the increasingly materialist and conformist society around her. She experiences a lesbian relationship with a teacher, and a passionate but ultimately doomed love affair with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry. At the end of the book, having failed to find her fulfilment in Skrebensky, she has a vision of a rainbow towering over the Earth, promising a new dawn for humanity:

"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heave

Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert. The novel ranges over the whole of British society before the time of the First World War and eventually ends high up in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. Ursula's character draws on Lawrence's wife Frieda, and Gudrun on Katherine Mansfield, while Rupert Birkin has elements of Lawrence himself, and Gerald Crich of Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.[1]

As with most of Lawrence's works, Women in Love caused controversy over its sexual subject matter. One early reviewer said of it, "I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven."[2] It also later stirred criticism for its portrayal of love, denounced as chauvinistic and centred upon the phallus by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex.[3] n."

Nice Work (1988) is a novel by British author David Lodge. It won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1988 and was also shortlisted for the Booker prize. In 1989 it was made into a four-part BBC television series directed by Christopher Menaul and starring Warren Clarke and Haydn

Gwynne. The University of Birmingham served as the filming location of many of the scenes from this series.

Plot summary[edit]

The book describes encounters between Robyn Penrose, a feminist university teacher specialising in the industrial novel and women's writing, and Vic Wilcox, the manager of an engineering firm. The relationship that develops between the unlikely pair reveals the weaknesses in each character. Robyn's academic position is precarious because of budget cuts. Vic has to deal with industrial politics at his firm.

The plot is a pastiche of the industrial novel genre, particularly referencing North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. This gentle ribbing acts to undermine the postmodern and feminist position of Robyn, who accepts the hand of fate despite ridiculing its role as the sole restorative capable (in the minds of authors of industrial novels) of elevating the female to a serious social position. Robyn acquires insight into the pragmatic ethos whose encroachment on university culture she resents and Vic learns to appreciate the symbolic or semiotic dimension of his environment and discovers a romanticism within himself that he had previously despised in his everyday life.

The story is set in the fictional city of Rummidge, a grey and dismal fictionalised Birmingham. It is part of the same series as the novels Changing Places, Small World, and Thinks .... In Nice Work, Philip Swallow is still head of the English Department from Small World and thus is Robyn Penrose's boss. Morris Zapp makes a cameo appearance in the last part of Nice Work, to add a plot twist where he tries to arrange for Robyn to have a job interview at his American university, Euphoric State (a fictionalized UC Berkeley), in order to stop his ex-wife from being a candidate for an open faculty position. Robyn Penrose makes a cameo appearance in Thinks

BELOVED

Toni Morrison

Set during the Reconstruction era in 1873, Beloved centers on the powers of memory and history. For the former slaves in the novel, the past is a burden that they desperately and willfully try to forget. Yet for Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, memories of slavery are inescapable. They continue to haunt her, literally, in the spirit of her deceased daughter. Eighteen years earlier, Sethe had murdered this daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery. Morrison borrowed the event from the real story of Margaret Garner, who, like Sethe, escaped from slavery in Kentucky and murdered her child when slave catchers caught up with her in Ohio. Beloved straddles the line between fiction and history; from the experiences of a single family, Morrison creates a powerful commentary on the psychological and historical legacy of slavery.

Part of Morrison’s project in Beloved is to recuperate a history that had been lost to the ravages of forced silences and willed forgetfulness. Morrison writes Sethe’s story with the voices of a people who historically have been denied the power of language. Beloved also contains a didactic element.

From Sethe’s experience, we learn that before a stable future can be created, we must confront and understand the “ghosts” of the past. Morrison suggests that, like Sethe, contemporary American readers must confront the history of slavery in order to address its legacy, which manifests itself in ongoing racial discrimination and discord.

THEMES · Slavery’s destruction of identity; the importance of community solidarity; the powers and limits of language

MOTIFS · The supernatural; allusions to Christianity

SYMBOLS · The color red; trees; the tin tobacco box

SONG OF SOLOMON

Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon, Morrison’s third novel, was popular with both critics and readers. In 1978, the novel won the National Critics Circle Award and the Letters Award. 570,000 paperback copies are currently in print. Morrison’s carreer continued its meteoric rise, and in 1988 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved. In 1993, Toni Morrison joined the exclusive ranks of the world’s premier writers when she became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Morrison’s fiction does not fit well into a single category. It blends themes of race and class, coming-of-age stories, and mythical and realistic genres. Some critics classify Morrison as magical realist in the vein of Gabriel García Márquez. However, others claim that she is a black classicist, an heir to nineteenth century European novelists such as Gustave Flaubert and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Finally, other scholars argue that African-American oral narratives, rather than European traditions, provide the raw material for her work. Morrison draws on all of these styles to create a rich tapestry of backgrounds and experiences for her distinctive characters.

Morrison’s biography serves as rich source material for the literary characters in Song of Solomon. Jake (also known as Macon Dead I) has experiences similar to those of Morrison’s beloved grandfather, John Solomon Willis. After losing his land and being forced to become a sharecropper, Willis became disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 document freeing black slaves. The character Heddy may have been modeled after Morrison’s Native American great-grandmother. Guitar is a composite character, made up of Morrison’s family and friends whose lives were destroyed by racism. Milkman’s journey to uncover his roots can be compared to Morrison’s own. Like Milkman’s, Morrison’s creative life began after age thirty and has been grounded in the African-American experience.

THEMES · Flight as a means of escape; abandoned women; the alienating effects of racism

MOTIFS · Biblical allusions; names; singing

SYMBOLS · Whiteness; artificial roses; gold

LOLITA

Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita also represents a classic example of postmodern literature. Postmodernism arose in the early years of the twentieth century and represented, in part, a move away from the notion that a novel should tell a realistic story from an objective perspective. Postmodern writers are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Lolita, narrates the novel from a highly subjective point of view, and he uses rich, sophisticated language to do so. Lolita contains a vast variety of linguistic devices, including puns, multilingual expressions, artistic allusions, word patterns, and references to other works. These devices followed from the then-popular idea that a novel was not a fixed work of literature, but rather a more fluid, organic creation that was interconnected with other media. Humbert’s elegant and sinuous prose, however, conceals a subversive intent. The beauty and intensity of the language allow readers to remain sympathetic to the pedophile protagonist and compel them to read further, despite the numerous distressing events within the novel.

Though Lolita is a fictional memoir, Nabokov actually shared many personality traits with his protagonist Humbert Humbert. Both men were highly educated, academically oriented European exiles who made their homes in America, and both possessed a compelling gift for language. However, unlike the pedophiliac, delusional Humbert, Nabokov was a devoted family man who lived a quiet, scholarly existence. Because of Lolita’s success as a novel and as a film, Nabokov had the funds to retire to Switzerland in 1960 and devote himself exclusively to writing until his death in 1977. A prolific author, Nabokov’s other notable works include Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969 While elements of Lolita lend themselves to film, and though the novel explicitly recognizes film as an influence, neither film fully captures the complicated mix of acrobatic language, black comedy, and tender romantic sentiment for which the novel had become famous. The novel has numerous references—from crude, lowbrow puns to highly obscure scholarly references—and it encompasses a vast array of human emotion—from tragic to comic. None of these elements come through as effectively on screen as they do in the book itself.

THEMES · The power of language; the dispiriting incompatibility of European and American cultures; the inadequacy of psychiatry; the alienation caused by exile

MOTIFS · Butterflies; doubles; games

SYMBOLS · The theater; prison

1984

George Orwell

1984 is one of Orwell’s best-crafted novels, and it remains one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian society. In Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, Orwell had witnessed the danger of absolute political authority in an age of advanced technology. He illustrated that peril harshly in 1984. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), 1984 is one of the most famous novels of the negative utopian, or dystopian, genre. Unlike a utopian novel, in which the writer aims to portray the perfect human society, a novel of negative utopia does the exact opposite: it shows the worst human society imaginable, in an effort to convince readers to avoid any path that might lead toward such societal degradation. In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the television had become a fixture in the family home, Orwell’s vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would be monitored ceaselessly by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly possible. That Orwell postulated such a society a mere thirty-five years into the future compounded this fear.

Of course, the world that Orwell envisioned in 1984 did not materialize. Rather than being overwhelmed by totalitarianism, democracy ultimately won out in the Cold War, as seen in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Yet 1984 remains an important novel, in part for the alarm it sounds against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for its penetrating analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of language and history can be used as mechanisms of control.

THEMES · The psychological, technological, physical, and social dangers of totalitarianism and political authority; the importance of language in shaping human thought

MOTIFS · Urban decay (London is falling apart under the Party’s leadership); the idea of doublethink (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time and believe them both to be true)

SYMBOLS · The glass paperweight (Winston’s desire to connect with the past); the red-armed prole woman (the hope that the proles will ultimately rise up against the Party); the picture of St. Clement’s Church (the past); the telescreens and the posters of Big Brother (the Party’s constant surveillance of its subjects); the phrase “the place where there is no darkness” (Winston’s tendency to mask his fatalism with false hope, as the place where there is no darkness turns out to be not a paradise but a prison cell

ANIMAL FARM

George Orwell

A dystopian novel, 1984 attacks the idea of totalitarian communism (a political system in which one ruling party plans and controls the collective social action of a state) by painting a terrifying picture of a world in which personal freedom is nonexistent. Animal Farm, written in 1945, deals with similar themes but in a shorter and somewhat simpler format. A “fairy story” in the style of Aesop’s fables, it uses animals on an English farm to tell the history of Soviet communism. Certain animals are based directly on Communist Party leaders: the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, for example, are figurations of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, respectively. Orwell uses the form of the fable for a number of aesthetic and political reasons. To better understand these, it is helpful to know at least the rudiments of Soviet history under Communist Party rule, beginning with the October Revolution of 1917.

In the Russia of 1917, it appeared that Marx’s dreams were to become reality. After a politically complicated civil war, Tsar Nicholas II, the monarch of Russia, was forced to abdicate the throne that his family had held for three centuries. Vladimir Ilych Lenin, a Russian intellectual revolutionary, seized power in the name of the Communist Party. The new regime took land and industry from private control and put them under government supervision. This centralization of economic systems constituted the first steps in restoring Russia to the prosperity it had known before World War I and in modernizing the nation’s primitive infrastructure, including bringing electricity to the countryside. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky jockeyed for control of the newly formed Soviet Union. Stalin, a crafty and manipulative politician, soon banished Trotsky, an idealistic proponent of international communism. Stalin then began to consolidate his power with brutal intensity, killing or imprisoning his perceived political enemies and overseeing the purge of approximately twenty million Soviet citizens.

THEMES · The corruption of socialist ideals in the Soviet Union; the societal tendency toward class stratification; the danger of a naïve working class; the abuse of language as instrumental to the abuse of power

MOTIFS · Songs; state ritual

SYMBOLS · Animal Farm; the barn; the windmill

TRISTRAM SHANDY

Laurence Sterne

The most striking formal and technical characteristics of Tristram Shandy are its unconventional time scheme and its self-declared digressive-progressive style. Sterne, through his fictional author-character Tristram, defiantly refuses to present events in their proper chronological order. Again and again in the course of the novel Tristram defends his authorial right to move backward and forward in time as he chooses. He also relies so heavily on digressions that plot elements recede into the

background; the novel is full of long essayistic passages remarking on what has transpired or, often, on something else altogether. Tristram claims that his narrative is both digressive and progressive, calling our attention to the way in which his authorial project is being advanced at the very moments when he seems to have wandered farthest afield.

By fracturing the sequence of the stories he tells and interjecting them with chains of associated ideas, memories, and anecdotes, Tristram allows thematic significance to emerge out of surprising juxtapositions between seemingly unrelated events. The association of ideas is a major theme of the work, however, and not just a structural principle. Part of the novel's self-critique stems from the way the author often mocks the perverseness by which individuals associate and interpret events based on their own private mental preoccupations. The author's own ideas and interpretations are presumably just as singular, and so the novel remains above all a catalogue of the "opinions" of Tristram Shandy.

Much of the subtlety of the novel comes from the layering of authorial voice that Sterne achieves by making his protagonist the author of his own life story, and then presenting that story as the novel itself. The fictional author's consciousness is the filter through which everything in the book passes. Yet Sterne sometimes invites the reader to question the opinions and assumptions that Tristram expresses, reminding us that Shandy is not a simple substitute for Sterne. One of the effects of this technique is to draw the reader into an unusually active and participatory role. Tristram counts on his audience to indulge his idiosyncrasies and verify his opinions; Sterne asks the reader to approach the unfolding narrative with a more discriminating and critical judgment.

Rabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike. The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life. It spawned several sequels, including Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, as well as a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered.

Updike has the unusual distinction of combining serious critical acclaim (although this has not been universal) and scholarly appreciation with a steady popularity with the reading public. Among his best-known novels are Couples (1968); The Witches of Eastwick (1984), which was made into a popular movie; and the “Rabbit” series: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Much of Updike’s fiction focuses on upper-middle-class suburban life, usually in New England or the Northeast, and often centers on a marriage under stress owing to the affairs of one or both of the partners. Updike has described his primary fictional concern as “the American small town, Protestant middle class”; the “Rabbit” series perfectly highlights this concern, as it traces the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a suburban Pennsylvanian, from adolescence though old age, one decade at a time. The series has been celebrated for its evocation of America in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Updike’s work has been shaped by his Christian faith and especially by the work of the Protestant theologians Karl Barth and Søren Kierkegaard.

The Centaur is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. [1] In French translation it won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize).

The story concerns George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his anxious son. George has largely given up on life; what glory he knew, as a football player and soldier in World War I, has passed. He feels put upon by the school's principal, and he views his students as hapless and uninterested in anything he has to teach them. Peter, meanwhile, is a budding aesthete who idolizes Vermeer and dreams of becoming a painter in a big city, like New York. He has no friends his age, and regularly worries that his peers might detect his psoriasis, which stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer. One thing George and Peter share is the desire to get out, to escape their hometown. This masculine desire for escape appears in Updike's famed "Rabbit" novels. Similarly, the novel's image of Peter's mother alone on an unfarmed farm is one we later see in Updike's 1965 novel Of the Farm.

Like James Joyce in Ulysses, Updike drew on the myths of antiquity in an attempt to turn a modern and common scene into something more profound, a meditation on life and man's relationship to nature and eternity. George is both the Centaur Chiron and Prometheus (some readers might see George's son Peter as Prometheus), Mr. Hummel, the automobile mechanic, is Hephaestus (AKA Vulcan); and so forth. The novel's structure is unusual; the narrative shifts from present day (late 1940s) to retrospective (early 1960s), from describing the characters as George, Vera, and the rest, to the Centaur, Venus, and so forth. It also is punctuated with a feverish dream scene and a newspaper obituary of George. Near the end of the book, Updike includes two untranslated Greek sentences. Their translation is as follows:

“ Having an incurable wound, he delivered himself into the cave. Wanting, and being unable, to have an end, because he was immortal, [then with] Prometheus offering himself to Zeus to become immortal for him, thus he died. ”

This quote is from Bibliotheca 2.5.4, and describes the death of Chiron.

The character of Peter is similar to Updike himself; both had schoolteacher fathers, lived in rural Pennsylvania, were passionate about painting, and suffered from psoriasis.

Portions of the novel first appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker.