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  • عنوان المشاركة: Literary Topics and Articles
مرسل: الاثنين آب 01, 2011 5:50 م 
دكتور في جامعة البعث
دكتور في جامعة البعث
اشترك في: 28 كانون الثاني 2010
المواضيع: 16
المشاركات: 212
القسم: English
السنة: Lecturer
لا يوجد لدي مواضيع بعد

:: ذكر ::


غير متصل
 
Greeting All and Happy Ramadan

I will add here some literary topics and articles that I find on the internet. Hope you all find them useful. All rights reserved to the original authors.


"The Old Man and the Sea"

Analysis of Major Characters:

Santiago

Santiago suffers terribly throughout The Old Man and the Sea. In the opening pages of the book, he has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish and has become the laughingstock of his small village. He then endures a long and grueling struggle with the marlin only to see his trophy catch destroyed by sharks. Yet, the destruction enables the old man to undergo a remarkable transformation, and he wrests triumph and renewed life from his seeming defeat. After all, Santiago is an old man whose physical existence is almost over, but the reader is assured that Santiago will persist through Manolin, who, like a disciple, awaits the old man’s teachings and will make use of those lessons long after his teacher has died. Thus, Santiago manages, perhaps, the most miraculous feat of all: he finds a way to prolong his life after death.

Santiago’s commitment to sailing out farther than any fisherman has before, to where the big fish promise to be, testifies to the depth of his pride. Yet, it also shows his determination to change his luck. Later, after the sharks have destroyed his prize marlin, Santiago chastises himself for his hubris (exaggerated pride), claiming that it has ruined both the marlin and himself. True as this might be, it is only half the picture, for Santiago’s pride also enables him to achieve his most true and complete self. Furthermore, it helps him earn the deeper respect of the village fishermen and secures him the prized companionship of the boy—he knows that he will never have to endure such an epic struggle again.

Santiago’s pride is what enables him to endure, and it is perhaps endurance that matters most in Hemingway’s conception of the world—a world in which death and destruction, as part of the natural order of things, are unavoidable. Hemingway seems to believe that there are only two options: defeat or endurance until destruction; Santiago clearly chooses the latter. His stoic determination is mythic, nearly Christ-like in proportion. For three days, he holds fast to the line that links him to the fish, even though it cuts deeply into his palms, causes a crippling cramp in his left hand, and ruins his back. This physical pain allows Santiago to forge a connection with the marlin that goes beyond the literal link of the line: his bodily aches attest to the fact that he is well matched, that the fish is a worthy opponent, and that he himself, because he is able to fight so hard, is a worthy fisherman. This connectedness to the world around him eventually elevates Santiago beyond what would otherwise be his defeat. Like Christ, to whom Santiago is unashamedly compared at the end of the novella, the old man’s physical suffering leads to a more significant spiritual triumph.
Manolin

Manolin is present only in the beginning and at the end of The Old Man and the Sea, but his presence is important because Manolin’s devotion to Santiago highlights Santiago’s value as a person and as a fisherman. Manolin demonstrates his love for Santiago openly. He makes sure that the old man has food, blankets, and can rest without being bothered. Despite Hemingway’s insistence that his characters were a real old man and a real boy, Manolin’s purity and singleness of purpose elevate him to the level of a symbolic character. Manolin’s actions are not tainted by the confusion, ambivalence, or willfulness that typify adolescence. Instead, he is a companion who feels nothing but love and devotion.

Hemingway does hint at the boy’s resentment for his father, whose wishes Manolin obeys by abandoning the old man after forty days without catching a fish. This fact helps to establish the boy as a real human being—a person with conflicted loyalties who faces difficult decisions. By the end of the book, however, the boy abandons his duty to his father, swearing that he will sail with the old man regardless of the consequences. He stands, in the novella’s final pages, as a symbol of uncompromised love and fidelity. As the old man’s apprentice, he also represents the life that will follow from death. His dedication to learning from the old man ensures that Santiago will live on.

Major Themes

Unity
Hemingway spends a good deal of time drawing connections between Santiago and his natural environment: the fish, birds, and stars are all his brothers or friends, he has the heart of a turtle, eats turtle eggs for strength, drinks shark liver oil for health, etc. Also, apparently contradictory elements are repeatedly shown as aspects of one unified whole: the sea is both kind and cruel, feminine and masculine, the Portuguese man of war is beautiful but deadly, the mako shark is noble but a cruel, etc. The novella's premise of unity helps succor Santiago in the midst of his great tragedy. For Santiago, success and failure are two equal facets of the same existence. They are transitory forms which capriciously arrive and depart without affecting the underlying unity between himself and nature. As long as he focuses on this unity and sees himself as part of nature rather than as an external antagonist competing with it, he cannot be defeated by whatever misfortunes befall him.

Heroism
Triumph over crushing adversity is the heart of heroism, and in order for Santiago the fisherman to be a heroic emblem for humankind, his tribulations must be monumental. Triumph, though, is never final, as Santiago's successful slaying of the marlin shows, else there would be no reason to include the final 30 pages of the book. Hemingway vision of heroism is Sisyphean, requiring continuous labor for quintessentially ephemeral ends. What the hero does is to face adversity with dignity and grace, hence Hemingway's Neo-Stoic emphasis on self-control and the other facets of his idea of manhood. What we achieve or fail at externally is not as significant to heroism as the comporting ourselves with inner nobility. As Santiago says, "[M]an is not made for defeat....A man can be destroyed but not defeated" (103).

Manhood
Hemingway's ideal of manhood is nearly inseparable from the ideal of heroism discussed above. To be a man is to behave with honor and dignity: to not succumb to suffering, to accept one's duty without complaint, and most importantly, to display a maximum of self-control. The representation of femininity, the sea, is characterized expressly by its caprice and lack of self-control; "if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them" (30). The representation of masculinity, the marlin, is described as Œgreat,' Œbeautiful,' Œcalm,' and Œnoble,' and Santiago steels him against his pain by telling himself, "suffer like a man. Or a fish," referring to the marlin (92). In Hemingway's ethical universe, Santiago shows us not only how to live life heroically but in a way befitting a man.

Pride
While important, Hemingway's treatment of pride in the novella is ambivalent. A heroic man like Santiago should have pride in his actions, and as Santiago shows us, "humility was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride" (14). At the same, though, it is apparently Santiago's pride which presses him to travel dangerously far out into the sea, "beyond all people in the world," to catch the marlin (50). While he loved the marlin and called him brother, Santiago admits to killing it for pride, his blood stirred by battle with such a noble and worthy antagonist. Some have interpreted the loss of the marlin as the price Santiago had to pay for his pride in traveling out so far in search of such a catch. Contrarily, one could argue that this pride was beneficial as it allowed Santiago an edifying challenge worthy of his heroism. In the end, Hemingway suggests that pride in a job well done, even if pride drew one unnecessarily into the situation, is a positive trait.

Success
Hemingway draws a distinction between two different types of success: outer, material success and inner, spiritual success. While Santiago clearly lacks the former, the import of this lack is eclipsed by his possession of the later. One way to describe Santiago's story is as a triumph of indefatigable spirit over exhaustible material resources. As noted above, the characteristics of such a spirit are those of heroism and manhood. That Santiago can end the novella undefeated after steadily losing his hard-earned, most valuable possession is a testament to the privileging of inner success over outer success.

Worthiness
Being heroic and manly are not merely qualities of character which one possesses or does not. One must constantly demonstrate one's heroism and manliness through actions conducted with dignity. Interestingly, worthiness cannot be conferred upon oneself. Santiago is obsessed with proving his worthiness to those around him. He had to prove himself to the boy: "the thousand times he had proved it mean nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it" (66). And he had to prove himself to the marlin: "I'll kill him....in all his greatness and glory. Although it is unjust. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures" (66). A heroic and manly life is not, then, one of inner peace and self-sufficiency; it requires constant demonstration of one's worthiness through noble action.


Hemingway's Writing Style


Hemingway's writing style owes much to his career as a journalist. His use of language — so different from that of, say, his contemporary William Faulkner — is immediately identifiable by most readers. Short words, straightforward sentence structures, vivid descriptions, and factual details combine to create an almost transparent medium for his engaging and realistic stories. Yet without calling attention to itself, the language also resonates with complex emotions and larger and larger meanings — displaying the writer's skill in his use of such subtle techniques as sophisticated patterns; repeated images, allusions, and themes; repeated sounds, rhythms, words, and sentence structures; indirect revelation of historical fact; and blended narrative modes.
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In The Old Man and the Sea, nearly every word and phrase points to Hemingway's Santiago-like dedication to craft and devotion to precision. Hemingway himself claimed that he wrote on the "principle of the iceberg," meaning that "seven-eighths" of the story lay below the surface parts that show. While the writing in The Old Man and the Sea reflects Hemingway's efforts to pare down language and convey as much as possible in as few words as possible, the novella's meanings resonate on a larger and larger scale. The story's brevity, ostensibly simple plot, and distance from much of this period's political affairs all lend the novella a simplistic quality that is as deceptive as it is endearing.

For example, Hemingway conveys one of the novella's central themes by repeatedly yoking religious conviction with a belief in luck. These repeated images and allusions, juxtaposed so often, suggest more than an appropriate sketch of Cuba's Catholic culture, affection for games of chance, and passion for baseball. Both religion and luck rely on ritual and have the power to engender the hope, dreams, faith, absorption, and resolution that ultimately take people beyond themselves. Supporting these repeated images and allusions is the repetition of certain rhythms and sentence structures that signal a kind of ritual or catechism in, for example, the conversations between Santiago and Manolin or the description of Santiago's precise actions in his fishing or in laying out the fish that will nourish him.

Hemingway the journalist also relies on resonances from historical and factual references to enrich the story and advance its themes — a technique used by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. For example, the novella's many baseball references enabled critics such as C. Harold Hurley and Bickford Sylvester to determine the exact dates in September when the story takes place; to infer a great deal about Cuba's cultural, economic, and social circumstances at the time; and to establish Manolin's exact age. These references do more than provide background information, establish the story's cultural context, and advance the plot. These references also indirectly reveal the characters' motivation, inform the dialogue, and uncover the story's integral thematic dimensions.

Hemingway also relies on blending narrative modes to achieve a shifting psychic distance. The story begins and ends with a third-person, omniscient narration that doesn't dip into Santiago's thoughts. The two parts of the story that take place on land benefit from this controlled reporting. For example, the poignancy of Santiago's circumstances at the story's beginning and the tragedy of his defeat at the story's end are not lost on readers, but instead resonate within them without melodrama because of this psychic distance. On the other hand, the part of the story that takes place at sea draws closer to Santiago's perspective by letting him talk to himself, by presenting a third-person narration of his thoughts, or by drifting subtly from either of these methods into a kind of interior monologue or limited stream of consciousness. This perspective is essential to the story's middle part at sea, which is an odyssey into the natural world, a coming to grips with the natural order, an acceptance of the inevitable cycle of life, and a redemption of the individual's existence. As the transition into Santiago's thoughts seems logical and intuitive because he is alone at sea, with no one to talk to, so does the transition back out again because he returns to land so deeply exhausted.

_________________
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  • عنوان المشاركة: Literary Topics and Articles
مرسل: الاثنين آب 01, 2011 6:01 م 
دكتور في جامعة البعث
دكتور في جامعة البعث
اشترك في: 28 كانون الثاني 2010
المواضيع: 16
المشاركات: 212
القسم: English
السنة: Lecturer
لا يوجد لدي مواضيع بعد

:: ذكر ::


غير متصل
 
2- "Light in August"

Summary

Lena Grove, whose parents are dead, goes to live with her brother. While there, she gets pregnant by a man named Lucas Burch, who runs out on her but not before saying that he'll send for Lena once he finds a town in which they can settle down. Hearing no word from Lucas for a long time, the pregnant Lena walks from Alabama into Mississippi looking for him. Along the way she hears that Lucas might be in Jefferson, so she walks toward that town. On the day she arrives in Jefferson, an old plantation house owned by Joanna Burden is on fire. We later learn that Joe Christmas, who lived in an old slave cabin on the plantation and was having a sexual relationship with Joanna, is accused of the murder. The Jefferson townspeople seem more angry that Joe is part black and has killed a white woman than they are about it being Joanna who was murdered.

Flashback three years earlier to the Jefferson planing mill where a man named Byron Bunch works; Byron will become one of the main characters — and a primary narrator — in the novel. A man named Joe Christmas shows up looking for work and is hired, followed soon thereafter by a man named Joe Brown being hired. Christmas and Brown work together and form a relationship about which the other workers are unsure. Brown lets it be known that Christmas used to run a whiskey distillery; it's unclear if Christmas still runs it. But the talk is that Christmas still does, and that Brown delivers the whiskey to whomever will buy it. Christmas quits the planing mill; Brown quits soon thereafter. We learn that Christmas — and perhaps Brown as well — supposedly lives in an old slave quarter on the grounds of an old plantation owned by Miss Joanna Burden. Burden's family had moved to Jefferson from the north during Reconstruction; Burden purportedly remains a Yankee — which in Jefferson means befriending blacks.

Byron Bunch is working alone at the planing mill when Lena Grove shows up looking for Lucas Burch. Byron and Lena strike up a conversation, during which Byron lets slip that Joe Brown is an alias of Lucas Burch's. Byron is disappointed because he has started to have affections for Lena.

The story recounts how Reverend Gail Hightower and his wife came to Jefferson long ago when Hightower was hired by a Jefferson Presbyterian church to be its minister. Oftentimes Hightower's wife leaves Jefferson supposedly to visit her family, but one day a woman from Jefferson who is in Memphis shopping sees Mrs. Hightower, and Jefferson soon begins gossiping about why Mrs. Hightower regularly visits Memphis. Eventually she is institutionalized, and once released returns to be with her husband in Jefferson. However, she soon again regularly visits Memphis and eventually dies after falling through a hotel window; she was in the hotel with a man with whom she had registered as husband and wife. The sensationalism of Reverend Hightower's wife having been in a Memphis hotel with another man turns Jefferson against Hightower, and eventually he is forced to resign his position from the church. The town tries to force him to leave Jefferson altogether, but he refuses. The furor eventually dies down, but Hightower is forever regarded as damned by the people of Jefferson.

Byron Bunch visits Hightower and narrates how the Burden house has burned down. Miss Burden is dead from her neck being cut, and it appears that the fire was set to cover up the murder. Brown is questioned by the sheriff and claims that Christmas and Miss Burden have been sleeping with one another; even more shocking to the sheriff is Brown's assertion that Christmas is part black. It's unclear how truthful Brown is in relating the details concerning Christmas, Miss Burden, and the fire.

The story then flashes back even farther when Joe Christmas was five years old and living in an orphanage, and he inadvertently caught the dietician and another orphanage employee having sex. Joe thinks he's in trouble because he was eating a mouthful of toothpaste in the dietician's room; the dietician thinks that Joe will tell that he saw her and the man together. The dietician contrives to get Joe sent to an orphanage for black children rather than remaining at the white children's orphanage. Eventually, a man named McEachern adopts Joe and takes him home; McEachern is unaware that Joe is part black.

Time passes, and Joe eventually grows into a teenager. At seventeen, he begins sneaking out of the McEachern house and meeting a waitress named Bobbie from town. Their relationship is sexual. Joe is more serious — and naïve — about their relationship than Bobbie is. McEachern begins to suspect that Joe is sneaking out of the house and one night sees Joe go into the stable, where Joe keeps a suit to wear when meeting Bobbie. A car picks up Joe, and McEachern follows on his horse. McEachern discovers Joe and Bobbie at a dance and begins yelling at Bobbie. Joe strikes McEachern with a chair. Bobbie runs from the dance, and Joe runs home to get the secret money that Mrs. McEachern has been hiding from her husband but not from Joe. Joe goes to where Bobbie lives, intending that he and Bobbie will run away together and get married. But the couple with whom Bobbie lives over the restaurant and a nameless man are preparing to leave town with Bobbie; all of them fear that Joe has killed McEachern and that the police will soon show up on their doorstep. Joe doesn't truly understand what's happening. The stranger repeatedly strikes Joe until Joe is close to losing consciousness.

Following his losing Bobbie, Joe runs away. For fifteen years he wanders, traveling between Chicago, Detroit, and Mexico, and finally heading into Mississippi. He happens upon the Burden house and breaks in to steal food. Joe is discovered by Miss Burden, who doesn't seem upset that Joe has broken into her kitchen. In fact, Miss Burden allows Joe to stay in an old slave cabin on her property. One night he enters the Burden house unannounced, goes to her bedroom, and has sex with her. But then, troubled with himself, Joe avoids her until one day he finds her in his cabin, where she tells Joe the story of herself and her ancestors.

Joe and Joanna's relationship goes through various phases. At one point, Joanna says that she's pregnant — although she is not. Toward the end of their relationship, Joanna tries to get Joe to go to a school for blacks and then become a lawyer, but Joe will not do these things, in part because that would mean he would first have to acknowledge that he is part black. The last phase of their relationship involves Joanna trying to get Joe to pray with her, but Joe refuses. Joanna suggests that perhaps both she and Joe should kill themselves, and not too long thereafter Joe kills Joanna.

The sheriff hunts for Joe but is unable to track him down. Byron Bunch speaks to Hightower and reveals that he has taken Lena to live in the cabin that Lucas Burch and Joe Christmas lived in on the Burden plantation. Joe, continually avoiding capture by the Jefferson sheriff, eventually hitches a ride going to Mottstown, which is not too far from Jefferson.

Joe is caught in Mottstown without putting up a struggle. During Joe's capture, Uncle Doc Hines is downtown and hears Joe's name being said by the townspeople. He runs up to the crowd holding Joe and begins yelling that Joe should be killed immediately. Later, Mrs. Hines asks her husband what he did with Milly's baby — meaning Joe Christmas; eventually we learn that Joe Christmas is the Hines' grandson, born to their daughter, Milly. The sheriff from Jefferson arrives in Mottstown and takes custody of Joe. Uncle Doc and Mrs. Hines buy two train tickets for Jefferson.

Back in Jefferson, Byron brings Doc and Mrs. Hines to Hightower's house, where Doc and Mrs. Hines individually recount Joe's history: The Hines' daughter, Milly, had sex with a black man from a traveling circus and got pregnant. Hines killed the man, and Milly eventually died giving birth to Joe. Hines took Joe without Mrs. Hines' knowledge and deposited him on an orphanage's doorstep. During the next five years, Hines watched Joe grow; Mrs. Hines had no idea if Joe was even alive. Once the Hines have finished relating Joe's history, Byron asks Hightower if Hightower will lie and say that Joe was with him when Joanna Burden was killed, thereby providing Joe an alibi. Hightower adamantly refuses.

Byron gets Hightower to come to the cabin in which Lena is staying because Lena is about to give birth. Doc and Mrs. Hines are there as well. Hightower helps Lena gives birth to a boy, and then returns home. Later, he again returns to the cabin and finds Lena and her son alone. Lena explains that Byron asked her to marry him and that she said no. Hightower learns that Byron has quit his job at the planing mill and is downtown at the courthouse.

Bryon talks the sheriff into taking Lucas Burch out to the cabin to show Lena and the baby to him. Lucas is surprised to see Lena, as well as the baby. He begins his usual deceitful banter about his wanting to take care of Lena and their child, but he's waiting on money and has enemies who don't want him to get it. He again walks out on Lena, slipping through a back window of the cabin so that the deputy sheriff waiting at the front won't see him. Byron spies Lucas leaving the cabin and follows him, eventually catching up to Lucas by the train tracks that run outside of Jefferson. Byron fights Lucas and is beaten — as he guessed he would be. Byron watches as Lucas jumps onto a train and disappears. While Byron is walking back to the cabin, a man in a passing wagon tells Byron that Joe has been killed.

We learn that as the deputy sheriff was leading Joe through the town square, Joe escaped. A young man named Percy Grimm, who had organized men to guard the courthouse, jail, and square, followed Joe and eventually saw Joe run into Hightower's house. Earlier, Joe's grandmother, Mrs. Hines, had visited Joe in jail and told Joe about Hightower. Over Hightower's assertion that Joe was with him the night Joanna Burden was murdered, Grimm repeatedly shoots Joe, and then castrates him with a butcher knife. Joe dies.

At the end of the novel, Lena is again on the road, only this time she has Byron Bunch and her baby with her. Bunch wants to marry Lena, but Lena seems consumed with finding Lucas Burch — plus she likes traveling.

Analysis of Characters

Joe Christmas

Light in August’s main protagonist, Joe Christmas, also stands as one of the novel’s most enigmatic characters. An angry man, he is a shadow figure who walks the fringes, treading neither lightly nor comfortably in both the black and white worlds. When Joe first appears, he provokes a healthy amount of curiosity on the part of the mill workers, accompanied by contempt for his smug aloofness and other disarming qualities. Though Faulkner provides many details of Joe’s life and character over the course of his tale, Christmas still remains a distant, inscrutable figure, closed and elusive. At the mill he is a cipher, a blank slate onto which others project their own biased and subjective notions of who they think the mysterious man truly is. Many believe that he hails from an unknown foreign country.

Several loose correlations connect Joe Christmas’s life to that of Jesus. The two figures share the same initials, Joe was left on the orphanage steps on Christmas, and Joe is in his early thirties when he is killed in the standoff in Hightower’s kitchen. But these suggestions of similarity are loose and gestural, allowing Faulkner to complicate and darken the moral nature of his protagonist. Faulkner’s characterization of Joe Christmas challenges and ultimately subverts any Christlike comparisons. Any attempt to see Joe Christmas as a martyr is complicated by his life of violence and his general contempt for humanity. He emerges as a classically flawed and conflicted modern antihero. A brooding loner, he is a man without an identity. Unaware of his birth name, much less his racial heritage, he wanders in a futile search for a place where he can belong. Whereas Jesus’ life inspired emulation and praise, Joe Christmas generates little sympathy from those around him. The grim conditions that surrounded his upbringing do little to explain or dismiss his compulsive need to inflict harm on others—and, in two cases, to go so far as to take a life. Christmas’s attempt to reclaim and establish his identity in the world is marred by a disdain for the very people who could possibly provide him with the comfort he seeks.

Lena Grove

Superficially, in light of the muted references to biblical imagery that Faulkner includes in the novel, Lena suggests Mary journeying to Bethlehem—but Mary as a lost, wide-eyed teenager. Instead of a stable, she gives birth to her son in a rustic cabin, eventually moving on with her surrogate Joseph, Byron Bunch, in tow. But that is where the comparison ends: more than anything, Lena can be seen as a simple embodiment of the novel’s life force. Whereas Joe Christmas brings violence and death to Jefferson, Lena brings her developing child and a flinty determination to find the baby’s father. She replaces Christmas and supplants his presence in the novel, giving birth to her son on a cot in the simple shelter that once housed the twin criminal Joes.

Whereas Joe Christmas is the classic tragic Faulkner figure, doomed to struggle and fail, Lena represents another Faulkner type, often reserved for select female characters in his fictional worlds. She is the wanderer, the young innocent, believable in her determination to make her baby legitimate. Lena is a survivor, yet she does not struggle against the challenges and the deprivation that she faces. At the same time, she does not allow her poverty, naïveté, and lack of education to conspire against her. She accepts suffering with little resistance, facing it head-on, withstanding it, and then continuing on her way. Her wanderings frame the narrative: at the beginning, she enters Jefferson alone. Then in her brief, symbolic stopover, the birth of her son offers a brief glimmer of hope to a town marked by murder and racial discord. Lena then takes to the road again, accompanied by her infant and older protector and admirer, embracing the freedom that once characterized Joe Christmas’s years of wandering.

Reverend Gail Hightower

Much of Reverend Hightower’s characterization centers around his quirky if not obsessive fixation on his grandfather’s Confederate cavalry unit. Though the dust and thundering charge of the unit have long dispelled, the hoofbeats and clamor still echo in Hightower’s memory. They serve as a powerful reminder of humans’ uneasy relationship with the past—its burden and ubiquitous presence. Through the figure of Hightower, the past becomes a living entity that is never escaped or left behind. Nor are its hard-won lessons always heeded, as violence and racial divide grip Jefferson and its environs almost as profoundly as in the days of the Civil War. Hightower’s life stands as a grim reminder of the fact that, for many, there is no fresh start, no hope for a new direction or change. His wife’s erratic behavior and subsequent suicide trigger a process of gradual decline, as Hightower bears the guilt and stigma of the scandal. He punishes himself—and the community at large at the same time—by refusing to admit total defeat in leaving town after he has been stripped of his duties.

In light of personal setback and unexpected disappointment, Hightower’s life stands as a testament to the recovery and reassertion of dignity and personal pride. Pride takes on a double meaning in Hightower’s tangled stream-of-consciousness musings. He attempts to reclaim the pride of self, his self-respect and self-esteem, while resisting vanity, a proud resistance against the vicious gossip and rumors that course through the community. In his musings and ruminations, Hightower stands as the moral or philosophical center of the novel. In the midst of the tragedy and ill circumstances that have marked his life, he is able to salvage greater strength, self-awareness, and wisdom. Along the way, he is also able to confront and lay to rest the family ghosts and the legacy of the painful past that haunts him still.

Byron Bunch

Inert, worn dull by years of routine and six-day work weeks, Byron Bunch lives in a detached and insulated world designed around the avoidance of entanglement—personal, emotional, or otherwise. When Lena arrives at the mill in Jefferson, her plight triggers an instinct in Byron to reach out and to engage, finally, the life of another. There is no doubt that Byron is a good man: he lives an honest, upstanding life and directs the choir at a rural church each Sunday, returning for the start of his shift the following morning. But it is a sanitized, hollow goodness, achieved through inaction and a regimented life free of any temptation or challenge. He has lived a moral life by avoiding rather than engaging the world around him. His growing attachment to Lena parallels a gradual awakening in Byron as he attempts to turn from the man he once was—the man who has protected himself too stringently from experiencing pain, sorrow, or conflict.

Bunch’s friendship with Hightower not only providers a much-needed source of inspiration and challenge to Byron but also adds a new layer of moral and philosophical complexity to his life. Byron turns to his friend for counsel and wisdom and in turn is able to reveal his own desires and intentions through his dialogues with the defrocked minister. Hightower casts doubt on the purity of Byron’s sentiments in reaching out to selflessly help Lena and questions his supposed disinterest or lack of ulterior motive in improving her situation. Byron is forced to resolve his feelings for Lena—confronting both public opinion and his own selfishness—to conclude, in the end, that he is an honorable man who has chosen to live a more fully engaged and fully present life. Byron’s willingness to fight Joe Brown, to be beaten by the larger man, is the visceral reawakening that he needs. It reveals finally his resolve to be involved in the life of another and his willingness to risk personal injury. Byron is determined to stand by Lena and deal with the conflicting emotions and vulnerabilities that he experiences in loving another. In the end, Byron may still have much to learn when it comes to courting and caring for Lena, but he has at last found a freedom and a purpose to his life hitherto avoided or ignored.

Essay: The Individual and the Community in Light of August   :idea:

(*Reprinted from Studies in American Literature, ed. Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy, Humanities Series, No. 8 (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 132-53, 170-72, by permission of Louisiana State University Press.)

Light in August is probably Faulkner's most complex and difficult novel. Here he combined numerous themes on a large canvas where many aspects of life are vividly portrayed. The publication of this novel marked the end of Faulkner's greatest creative period — in four years he had published five substantial novels and numerous short stories. Light in August is the culmination of this creative period and is the novel in which Faulkner combines many of his previous themes with newer insights into human nature. In Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner had examined the relationship of the individual to his family. In his next major novel, Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner returned to the family as the point of departure for his story. In Light in August, the family as a unit is replaced by the community, which although not examined as the family is in other novels, serves as the point of departure.

The novel may be interpreted on many levels. It suggests such themes as man's isolation in the modern world, man's responsibility to the community, the sacrifice of Christ, the search-for-a-father, man's inhumanity to man, and the theme of denial and flight as opposed to passive acceptance and resignation.

Each of these can be adequately supported, but none seems to present the whole intent of the novel. Perhaps this is because the complexity of the novel yields to no single interpretation but seems to require a multiple approach.

The complex theme of man's need to live within himself while he recognizes his responsibility both to himself and to his fellow man will support such a multiple approach to Light in August. The reaction of the various characters to the community offers another basic approach to the novel. Phyllis Hirshleifer emphasizes the isolation of man in the novel, while Cleanth Brooks sees in it man's relationship in the community. These two views do not exclude each other. The isolation of each character only reinforces his struggle for status both with the community and with himself.

Light in August follows in the logical pattern set by Faulkner's two earlier novels, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. The preceding novels dealt with man trying to find a meaningful relationship with the immediate family, and this one deals with man in relationship to the community and as an isolated being unable to communicate with his fellow man.

Cleanth Brooks writes that the community serves as "the field for man's actions and the norm by which his action is judged and regulated." But the difficulty here is that we do not have a sufficient picture of the norm. It would be accurate to regard the community as a force which man tries to assail or avoid. And as Miss Hirshleifer writes: "The society through which Lena moves, the people who give her food, lodging, money and transportation because of her patient understanding modesty are, after all, the same people who crucify the Christmases whose evil arouses their own." It is, therefore, the responses of the community to the individual that become significant. While Lena evokes responses for good, Joe Christmas seems to arouse their evil instincts, and Hightower arouses their suspicion.

But these responses are not seen, as Brooks suggests, from the view of the community, but through the effects they produce on the individual character. Thus the community reacts in varying ways, but none of these reactions could accurately be considered as the norm of behavior. And even though Lena is able to evoke responses for good from various people, she remains outside the community. Each character in the novel is seen as a lonely individual pitted against some force either within or outside himself. Lena, Byron Bunch, Hightower, Christmas, Joanna Burden, Joe Brown, Uncle Doc Hines, and even people like Percy Grimm and McEachern stand outside the community. This is further emphasized by the fact that both Lena and Christmas are orphans who have no family whom they can return to. The community is also used as the objective commentator on the action. We get the long-range view usually from the point-of-view of the community, but nowhere during any of the long views does the community make any definite moral evaluations.

The isolation theme is carried over into the structure of the novel. The novel may be broken down into many groups of seemingly isolated vignettes. Each scene, however, is part of one large thematic mosaic, and none could be successfully removed without destroying the whole. Likewise, each isolated character in each isolated scene is viewed in the final analysis as a part of the structure of a unified whole. Thus the isolation of each character is supported by the structural device of presenting the action of the novel in groups of vignettes.

Lena wills her own isolation. Although she could have left her brother's home unmolested and by the front door, she chose to leave by the window which had played such a prominent part in her pregnancy. She never complains of her lot and never asks for help from anyone. However, she instinctively knows that people will help her; so she comes to accept their help at face value. Her simple faith in life is echoed by her belief that she ought to be with the father of her child when it is born: "I reckon the Lord will see to that." Her responses to life are the simple and basic reactions founded on a simple philosophy of charity and hope. She is always anxious to help those people who give her assistance, and she would always "be obliged" if others would share her meager meals with her. She constantly feels the need to commune and share her experience with others.

Even though she relies upon the kindness of strangers, her strength lies in the fact that she has assumed complete responsibility for her acts. She blames no person for her predicament, and she acknowledges no outside hostile force working against her. Lena, then, brings with her the potential salvation and redemption of Byron Bunch and Hightower by evoking from them responses for good and forcing them to become involved in responsibility.

Byron Bunch, during his seven years in Jefferson before Lena's arrival, had only one acquaintance, the Reverend Gail Hightower, who was an outcast completely isolated from the community. The community had never noticed Byron, except in a casual way to comment upon his idiosyncrasies, until he became involved with Lena. Merely by her passivity and her simple questions, Lena forces Byron to become involved. After revealing to her the identity of Joe Brown, Byron then feels responsible to her. This feeling of responsibility draws Bryon out of his lethargic existence and forces him into the stream of life. He in turn tries to involve Hightower, who struggles against Byron's interference. Hightower has lived too long in his isolated world of self-abnegation and denial to see that Byron must feel responsible for Lena. He cannot understand Byron's actions and interprets them as possessing some ulterior motive.

But Byron's actions are the outcome of more than thirty years of routine monotony and celibacy. Byron, like Lena, had willed his own isolation in Jefferson; however, with the appearance of Lena, he is forced to become involved in society. His potential redemption is that he is able to live outside himself and commune with another person; and even though this involvement was forced upon him, his strength and salvation lie in the fact that he willingly accepts the responsibility for his actions. Not only does he commit the necessary acts of preparing for Lena's child and acting as her protector, but also, he exceeds the demands made upon him when he follows after the fleeing Brown and confronts him even though he knows that he will be beaten. Thus Byron, after willing his own isolation, has involvement forced upon him which he willingly accepts.

Hightower's isolation is likewise somewhat self-imposed. Initially, the isolation derived from forces over which he had no control. His grandfather's ghost haunted his Calvinistic conscience until it forced him to marry a girl whom he did not love and subject her to his own ghosts. He is haunted by two conflicting views of his grandfather — that of the romantic cavalry officer galloping down the streets with drawn saber and that of the grandfather shot while stealing chickens, and furthermore, shot probably by some woman.

The seminary he attended acted not as a sanctuary from his phantoms, as he hoped it would, but rather as a means of furthering his ends and preparing him for a call to Jefferson. At the seminary, he met his future wife, who wanted to escape from the tedium of her life there. At Jefferson, he confused God with his grandfather, galloping horses with salvation, and the cavalry with Calvary. His sermons then reflected his own confusion and, as he later realizes, did not bring to the congregation the messages of hope and forgiveness.

When his wife commits suicide as a result of Hightower failure as a husband, the congregation then turns against High-tower. He then becomes the rejected and isolated minister. Therefore, part of his isolation is forced upon him, but in part it derives from his own inner failure to bring the past and present into a workable unity.

Carl Benson writes: "Hightower shapes his own destiny by acts of will, and he is, therefore, morally accountable for his choice." It seems, however, that Hightower's earlier life was shaped for him from forces of the past over which he had no control. These are the forces which ultimately cause him to be rejected by the Presbyterian congregation. It is only after his dismissal that Hightower wills his own destiny, and therefore becomes morally liable for it. His choice to stay in Jefferson despite persecution, disgrace, and physical violence results in his complete isolation. His moral responsibility derives from the sanctity of isolation away from the community. He thinks that because he suffered the disgrace and shame, the physical torment and pain, he has won the right to peace and solitude and the privilege of remaining uninvolved in life. He refuses to accept responsibility for his past faults because his suffering has atoned for his previous errors.

But with the entrance of Lena into Jefferson, Hightower is forcefully drawn into the stream of life again and realizes that the past has not been bought and paid for. Hightower, therefore, cannot become the effective moral reflector of the novel until he is able to come to terms both with himself and his fellow man, and until he assumes a place in society again and recognizes his responsibility to himself and his fellow man.

Lena, Byron, and Hightower all will their isolation. Joe Christmas' isolation is forced upon him early in his life by outside forces and attitudes. Part of his plight in life comes from the fact that he can never accept anything but partial responsibility for his acts and at the same time attempts to disclaim all responsibility for them. Just before killing Joanna, he thinks that "Something is going to happen to me," which suggests that Christmas looks upon his violent actions as being compelled by exterior forces which relieve him of any personal responsibility. But then this only increases his predicament, because he does feel a partial responsibility for his actions. If, then, Christmas' life and attitudes are shaped by exterior forces, it is necessary, in order to understand his plight, to determine how much Christmas feels he should be held responsible for his acts.

Joe's earliest attitudes were formulated in the orphanage. It was here that he first discovered that he possessed Negro blood — a fact that in one way or another controlled or affected his every act throughout life. His remaining life was spent trying to bring these two irreconcilable opposites into a significant relationship. His unknown father bequeathed him his Negro blood, and this heritage, over which he had no control, is the strongest influence upon his life. At the orphanage he is first called "nigger." The blood cages him in, and the vigilance of Euphues Hines sets him apart from the rest of the orphans. He is unable to establish a meaningful relationship with any of the other children, and he senses his difference.

One experience at the orphanage, especially, has multiple consequences for Christmas. When he is discovered stealing the dietitian's toothpaste, he expects punishment and instead is bribed with more money than he knew existed. This experience becomes the determining factor in his attitude toward the order of existence, women, and sex throughout the rest of his life. Since he was kept in suspense for several days desiring punishment which never came, he was left confused as to the meaning of his act.

Therefore, during the rest of his life when the pattern or order of existence is broken, the result is usually disastrous. When he transgresses McEachern's rules he expects and receives punishment, which accords with his idea of the order of things. This is again why he detests the interference of Mrs. McEachern. She, like the dietitian, represents a threat to the settled order of human existence. Or else, with each prostitute during his years on the road, he would tell her that he was a Negro, which always brought one reaction. When this pattern is broken by the prostitute who did not care whether he was Negro or not, his reactions are violent and he beats her unmercifully.

Thus his violent outburst comes from the unconscious desire to punish the dietitian who had first violated his pattern of order. The same reaction is seen in his relationship with Joanna Burden. For about two years, their relationship conformed to an ordered (though unorthodox) pattern; but when Joanna broke this pattern with her demands that Christmas take over her finances, go to a Negro school, and finally that he pray with her in order to be saved, he again reacted violently to this violation of his concept of an ordered existence.

His basic hatred for women ultimately returns to this episode. The dietitian in violating his order of existence also attempted to destroy his individuality. Thus the effeminizing efforts of Mrs. McEachern to soften his relations with his foster father are rejected because if he yielded to them, he would face the possibility of losing the firm and ordered relation with McEachern. As long as he maintains this masculine relationship with McEachern, he feels that he retains his individuality.

And, finally, the childhood episode with the dietitian is reflected in his sex life. The toothpaste becomes the basic symbol. At the same time that it is a cleansing agent, it also serves as a phallic symbol. The result of the scene is his utter sickness caused by the "pink woman smelling obscurity behind the curtain" and the "listening . . . with astonished fatalism for what was about to happen to him." Each subsequent sex relation, therefore, brings a guilt feeling to Christmas. He associated sex with filth, sickness, violation of order, and the potential loss of individuality.

Likewise, it is significant that each of his subsequent encounters with sex is accompanied by strong sensory images. When he beats the young Negro girl, it is amid the strong odors of the barn and he is also reminded of the sickness caused by the toothpaste. Later, his first encounter with Bobbie Allen is in the restaurant where he goes to order food, and finally, he meets Joanna in her kitchen when he is stealing food from her. Each of these sensory occurrences recalls to him the scene with the dietitian and again threatens the loss of individuality and the breaking of an ordered existence.

Christmas' need for order is violated in turn by each of the women with whom he comes into contact. The lesson he learned early in life was that he could depend upon men, but women were forever unpredictable. It was the woman who always broke the pattern of order. First the dietitian, then Mrs. McEachern violated his concept of order, and then Bobbie Allen turned violently against him at the time when he most needed her. The last woman to break his order of existence was Joanna Burden, who paid for it with her life.

The women, then, serve as the destroyers of order. This is brought out mechanically by Faulkner by using the biblical concept of woman as being unclean. Their menstrual period breaks the order of their life and then comes to represent their unordered and unclean life. The first time he learned of their monthly occurrences, Christmas' reactions were violent and ended in a blood baptism — the blood being taken from a young sheep that he killed. But even then he rejected this knowledge so that when Bobbie Allen tried to explain the same thing to him, again his reactions were violent, this time ending with his vomiting. When he next sees Bobbie, he takes her with force and animal brutality. Again, he seems to be reacting against his initial introduction to sex through the dietitian, again asserting his masculinity by forcing order upon the woman.

Christmas' great need for order reverts basically to the two bloods in him which are in constant conflict. As stated previously, his blood is his own battleground. He can neither accept nor reject his mixture of blood, and neither can he bring these two elements into a workable solution. Christmas' plight results from his inability to secure a suitable position in society and he searches for a society that will accept both elements of his blood. Unable to find this, he isolates himself from all human society.

Christmas' youthful love for Bobbie Allen existed on an idealistic plane because he was able to confess his Negro blood to her and be accepted by her as an individual. However, her betrayal of his love accompanied by her taunts of "nigger bastard" and "clod-hopper" implants the idea in his mind that due to his blood he must remain the isolated being.

His search for peace, then, is a search for someone who could accept Joe Christmas as an individual despite his conflicting blood. When Joanna Burden asks Christmas how he knows he has Negro blood, he tells her that if he has no Negro blood, then he has "wasted a lot of time." He has spent his whole life and energy trying to reconcile these two bloods, and if he has no Negro blood then all the efforts of his life have been to no avail."

Joanna Burden should have been the person who could have accepted Joe for what he was. By the time of their involvement, Christmas no longer seems to revolt against being called a Negro. But Joanna fails him. In being corrupted by him, she seems to enjoy the corruption even more by screaming "Negro! Negro!" as he makes love to her. At thirty-three, Joe has learned to accept this name-calling without the accompanying violent reactions; he is living in partial peace with himself, even though this peace has been found only in complete isolation.

He must reject all of mankind in order to find peace. This is seen when Byron offers Christmas food and the offer is rejected. Therefore, when Joanna offers him jobs, wants him to go to school, or tries to get him to pray, he feels that she is trying to destroy his isolation and peace. He is then forced to kill her or allow his own individuality, order, and peace to be destroyed by her. Faulkner conveys this on the story level simply by the fact that Joanna planned to kill Christmas and would have succeeded if the pistol had not failed her. Christmas is then forced to kill her in self-protection.

His life, his individuality, his peace, and his order would have been destroyed by Joanna had he yielded to her. And her death is accompanied by Christmas' refrain: "all I wanted was peace." But even at Joanna Burden's house, Joe could not attain his desired peace with himself because the warring elements of his blood compelled him to tell others that he was a Negro. At least, he confessed to Joanna and Brown. If, then, he could achieve peace only by isolating himself from people and by rejecting all responsibility toward society, he could never attain inner peace until he could accept himself and his own blood, both Negro and white.

Since Joanna was an overpowering threat to Joe's sense of peace and order, he realized that he must murder her or be destroyed by her. But the murder was not one in cold blood. The elaborate and symbolic rituals preceding the actual performance suggest that Joe is involved in a deep struggle with himself. The murder, instead of resolving his minor conflicts, severs him forever from any hope of becoming a meaningful part of society.

It is significant that he does not attempt to escape. He never leaves the vicinity of the crime. On the Tuesday after the Friday of the crime, he enters the Negro church and curses God. This is the height of his conflict. The white blood can no longer remain pacified and must express itself in violence. It remains now for Joe to come to terms with the conflicting elements within himself, and this can be done only within the circle of his own self; consequently, there is no need for Joe to leave the immediate neighborhood of his crime.

When Joe exchanges his shoes for the Negro's brogans, he seems to accept his heritage for the first time in his life. And with his acceptance of his black blood, Joe Christmas finds peace for the first time in his life. Like Lena Grove, who always accepted her responsibility, Joe realizes now that in order to find peace, he must accept full responsibility for his heritage and actions. And again like Lena, when he accepts this responsibility, he finds peace and contentment, and he becomes unified with nature.

Following this recognition and acceptance, he undergoes once more a symbolic cleansing ritual. This time using the Negro's shoes to sharpen his razor, Christmas prepares himself for his return to town in order to assume responsibility for his actions.

It is when Joe accepts his Negro heritage and recognizes that he can never escape from himself that he breathes quietly for the first time in his life and is suddenly hungry no longer. This recognition that he is no longer hungry becomes significant against the background of Joe's earlier life, which was filled with a constant struggle against hunger. That is, when he accepts himself, he symbolically becomes at peace with his tormenting hunger and also he sleeps peacefully for the first time.

With his acceptance of his responsibility and his recognition of his heritage, Joe can once more approach others. This is revealed by the scenes which immediately precede and follow Joe's self-realization. In the first scene, Joe approaches a Negro in order to ask him the day of the week, and his mere appearance creates astonishment and terror in the Negro's mind. He flees from Christmas in utter horror. But immediately after Joe has come to peace with himself, he approaches another Negro who quite naturally and nonchalantly offers him a ride to Mottstown.

Joe now has achieved an acceptance for himself, and he thinks that he will sleep, but then realizes that he needs no sleep and no food because he has found peace within himself. Thus Joe has traveled farther in the last seven days than in all the years of his life, because for the first time he has come to a complete recognition of his own life and sees that the true value or meaning of life is within his circle where he is able to achieve an understanding with himself.

Joe's plight in life, however, is not resolved. He could gain a partial truce with society by isolating himself from society; or else, he could attain a full acceptance of himself, but note that this was achieved while outside the community in complete isolation. Once he has recognized his responsibility, he must then return to the community. And once again in the community, he comes to the realization that he can never be accepted by society. The realization of his complete rejection is made more terrible by the wild rantings of his own grandfather, who demands his death." Thus, if old Doc Hines must persecute his own grandson, Joe realizes that there can be peace for him only in death. His escape finally, however, seems to be not so much because of the fanaticism of old Doc Hines, but rather because of the quiet persuasion of Mrs. Hines. Her appearance at the jail was probably Joe's final proof of the woman's need to destroy his individuality.

Doc and Mrs. Hines then contribute to Joe's death, since they set peaceful elements into contention again. Consequently, his escape is an escape from woman and also a search for peace and order through death. It is, therefore, logical that after his escape he runs first to a Negro cabin and then to Hightower's house. Through Mrs. Hines, Hightower has become the symbol of hope and peace to Christmas, and in his search for peace through death, he chooses Hightower's house as his sanctuary in which he passively accepts his crucifixion. His failure to fire the pistol is symbolic of his acceptance of his crucifixion and death and of his recognition that he can find peace only in death.

The violent death and castration of Christmas at the hands of Percy Grimm implant in our memories the atrocities that man is capable of committing against his fellow man. Grimm becomes the extreme potential of all the community when society refuses to accept its responsibility to mankind. Or as Hightower uttered when he first heard about Christmas: "Poor man. Poor mankind." That is, Joe's death is not as much a tragedy for Joe as it is a tragedy for the society which would allow such a crime as

Grimm's to be perpetrated. In Grimm's act, therefore, we see the failure of man to attain recognition, sympathy, or communion among other men and society's failure to accept man in the abstract.

But Joe's death was not in vain. Through his death and through the birth of Lena's child, Hightower has attained salvation in life by arriving at a complete realization of his own responsibility. Earlier in life, Hightower thought that through suffering he had won for himself the privilege of remaining uninvolved in life. But with the appearance of Lena, he becomes once more drawn into the active stream of life. This participation was not voluntary but forced upon him in the first instance (delivering Lena's child), but after rejecting Mrs. Hines's pleas, his second act (attempting to save Joe's life) is entirely voluntary.

Originally the attraction of Hightower and Byron to each other depended upon both being isolated from the community; but as Byron becomes involved, he draws Hightower in also. Until after Lena gives birth, Hightower struggles to retain his isolation and advises Byron to do the same. But Byron's involvement is too deep. Hightower's struggle for isolation becomes more intense as he sees himself threatened with involvement, especially when he is asked by Byron and Mrs. Hines to lie for Joe Christmas' (and in Hightower's words, mankind's) benefit. His refusal is his last futile but passionate effort to retain his isolation.

But Hightower goes to the cabin and successfully delivers Lena's child. This act of giving life to Lena's child becomes symbolic of Hightower's restoration to life. Immediately after the act, he walks back to town thinking that he won't be able to sleep, but he does sleep as peacefully as Lena's newborn child. He notices for the first time the peaceful serenity of the August morning, he becomes immersed in the miracle of life, and he realizes that "life comes to the old man yet." He views the birth as a sign of good fortune and an omen of goodwill. Therefore, this act of involvement and responsibility has restored Hightower to the human race.

This was Monday morning. Monday afternoon, Hightower is faced with his second act of involvement when Christmas flees to his house for sanctuary. This violence which Hightower must face is his payment for recognizing his responsibility in life. But having assisted in the birth of Lena's child and having recognized his involvement in life, he can no longer retract. Therefore, having acknowledged a partial responsibility, he must now perform his act of complete involvement in life by attempting to assume responsibility for Joe Christmas.

And even though Hightower fails Christmas, he has achieved salvation for himself. He does not realize this until later on in the evening when the whole meaning of his life evolves in front of him "with the slow implacability of a mediaeval torture instrument." And through this wheel image, he sees that man cannot isolate himself from the faces surrounding the wheel. Man must become a part of the community and must assume responsibility not only for his own actions but also for the actions of his fellow man.



Important Quotations Explained:

1. ‘It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change.’


Byron Bunch thinks these words near the end of Chapter 3, when his growing friendship and intimacy with Reverend Hightower is initially traced. Eventually, Byron, out of curiosity, asks the minister why he chose to stay in Jefferson “almost within sight of” the scene of his humiliation at the hands of his parishioners, who turned their backs on him in the wake of his personal crisis upon his wife’s death. Hightower avoids the question and turns the tables, interrogating Byron about his habit of working at the mill every Saturday night instead of enjoying his leisure in town like the other men. Both men conclude facilely that it is simply “life,” that it is the course their individual destinies have taken. But both know that such a pat and simple-minded response is an elaborate avoidance of the fear, loneliness, isolation, and inability to reenter and embrace life that underlies each of their existences. Byron uses the exchange as the occasion to meditate on the nature of personal risk and the potentially harmful self-exposure involved in seeking and embracing change.

Isolation and emotional detachment are among the numerous defense mechanisms that both men employ in their approaches to their individual lives. Each engages in a strategy of emotional risk management. Hightower, by cloistering himself and cutting himself off from the outside world, believes that he is minimizing the risk that tragedy or disappointment will ever be visited on his doorstep again. This somewhat paranoid reaction and fear of the unknown comes as a response to the tension and wide gulf that exists in Light in August between the individual and the community. In a world in which the past brings a conflicted legacy of personal and public shame, individuals such as Byron and Hightower, subject to the harsh criticism and censure of the community at large, choose to avoid any situation or course of action that might compromise their sense of self.


2. Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

These sentences form the opening of Chapter 6, as young Joe Christmas is about to sneak into the dietician’s room at the orphanage to steal more of her toothpaste. Memory—and the long shadows it casts, influencing and altering the present and the future—is one of the central concerns of Faulkner’s multifaceted inquiry into the moral fiber of his characters. Both the quotation and the passage it introduces are characteristic of Faulkner’s rambling, free-associative style. At times, his descriptions and commentaries take on the quality of a prose poem, a tumbling series of images and impressions that cumulatively enacts and approximates the fleeting, half-formed images that constitute, in this case, a five-year-old’s earliest memories and sensory impressions.

For many of Faulkner’s characters, the past represents an inheritance of struggle, pain, humiliation, and shame—a legacy that the characters spend the rest of their lives trying to outrun and deny. The history of abuses and neglect that punctuate Joe’s formative years forms a record of memory more powerful than any literal, “objective” recounting of the events that make up his life. Faulkner argues that a fleeting moment—an incident as random as a little boy stealing a squirt of toothpaste—can have implications that reach far beyond the moment. The cold and oppressive hallways of the orphanage form a psychic space that Joe carries with him, in memory, for the rest of his life. Whether the characters consciously recognize or acknowledge the events that shape their lives, they retain their memories, permanent and inalterable. Beyond recollection and wonder, beyond the rational consideration of the events that mark Joe’s life, lies the more potent and inescapable history of scars, both psychic and physical, that he bears. It is collectively these memories, and the slights and abuses they represent, that make him who he is and that conspire to drive him to his tragic end.

3. Perhaps he realised that he could not escape. Anyway, he stayed, watching the two creatures that struggled in the one body like two moon-gleamed shapes.

This passage, referring to Christmas’s escalating affair with Miss Burden in Chapter 12, perfectly captures the psychic schism present in many of the novel’s characters. Faulkner strove to populate his novels with complex personalities—presences that cannot be reduced to simple, one-dimensional summation. His style and technique testify to the fact that no one version of the truth, no one set of explanations or motivations, is sufficient to explain what lies behind his characters’ often complicated and multifaceted drives and needs.

Joe Christmas is a man trapped by circumstance and by his own feckless desire to leave his past and his crimes behind him. He feels that he should extricate himself from the physical longing that binds him increasingly to Miss Burden, but he cannot. He begins, instinctively, in thinking of his sudden residence on the Burden property, to “see himself as from a distance,” unable to do anything but bear witness to Miss Burden’s physical and emotional trials. As Joe gets to know his lover more intimately, he sees a gender divide in Miss Burden—both a male and a female presence struggling for supremacy over her. Moreover, a spiritual and physical struggle splits Miss Burden. By accounts contained and invulnerable, reckless and sexually vulnerable, she fights against her own rational nature, struggling over her need to be strong and independent on one hand and her need to surrender physically and spiritually to Joe on the other. In Faulkner’s world, individuals struggle not only against community, society, and the past but also against themselves and their unstable, often fluid senses of identity.

4. [H]e believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe. He was saying to himself I had to do it already in the past tense; I had to do it. She said so herself  

This description is found toward the end of Chapter 12, when Christmas, seated in the garden and listening to the town clock chime ten and then eleven at night, has ultimately resolved to kill Miss Burden. The passage mirrors the frenzied, incoherent, and contradictory thoughts of a man who lashes out by choice, driven by an irrational and compulsive need to destroy his own happiness and that of others. Joe’s all-consuming desire for revenge and violence is a bestial, primal, almost nonverbal drive. It resists articulation, easy explication, or the neat and orderly explanations that language is usually able to provide.

The passage also enacts, through the spill of language that attempts to replicate Joe’s feverish impressions and conclusions, the competing and contradictory thought processes that divide Christmas. Clearly the murder is premeditated—conceived as if it were in the past, an act already performed. At the same time, Joe’s thoughts betray a paradoxical desire to be absolved of guilt, that he is a “volitionless servant,” overpowered by a force, larger and stronger than his own will or resistance, that compels him to take a life. There is a glimmer of moral sense in his tortured thoughts. Part of him recognizes that he does “not believe” in murder. But as Joe, like Reverend Hightower, increasingly occupies a world of his own making, time collapses, and the distinctions between past, present, and future—the logical progressions that link cause and effect and action and consequence—are erased. Joe is left with a resolution to kill in which he feels justified and that he feels that he has no choice but to heed.

5. “I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. . . . The bad men can deny it; that’s why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. . . . Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad.”

Byron speaks these words at the end of Chapter 16, after he has brought the Hineses to see Reverend Hightower and is about to ask the minister to lie and claim that Joe Christmas was at Hightower’s house on the night of the murder. This quotation complements Byron’s notion that one of life’s major preoccupations is the attempt to sidestep trouble and entanglement. Byron, however, has finally come to realize that his strategy of denial and avoidance, that has served him in good stead for most of his thirty years, is no longer an acceptable means of ordering his life. He believes that there is no escaping accountability, no matter how detached or aloof one is, and that suffering and emotional duress are a harsh reality, if not a curse, that few fail to encounter.

Byron’s words bear heavily religious undertones. He has spent his days on the fringes, thinking that by living a disengaged, morally lazy existence, he has postponed any need to repent or account for his transgressions at the end of his life. About to commit himself to the safety and livelihood of Lena and her child, Byron realizes finally that suffering and hardship are unavoidable. By keeping them so stringently at bay up to this point, he has also foolishly excluded himself from love and companionship as well.

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M. Samhar AlAbiad,  
يعطيك العافية دكتور  *1
بخصوص العجوز والبحر ابقا طلاب السنة الاولى بيلاقو فيها افادة كبيرة كونو الدكتور ابراهيم عطاها من سنتين بمادة النثر وكانت المواضيع الرئيسية اللي ركز عليها الدكتور هي:

 
1.        Determination and Resolution

You must have a strong will to do things. If you lose hope in life, you will not get anything.
Santiago was hopeful all the time. Despite his hunger, old tools, and his age, he continued fighting. At the end he gets his reward for his work by catching a big fish.

2.        Friendship and Brotherhood

3.        Nature
It is a real nature; it is in Cuba, Havana.

Santiago loves the element of nature and everything around him. You can fell the nature through the sea and even in Santiago’s last dream of the African beach.

4.        The Message: the author is trying to give you a message through the work. You have to love Santiago, and you have to be optimistic all the time. He wants us also to understand that everything is possible and that we have always to work hard in order to get what we want.

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3- "Twelfth Night"

Plot Summary:

Various critics divide Twelfth Night into various types of plots and/or subplots. Regardless of the exact number of plots and subplots, however, the main thing is that they are all woven together with immense skill to ultimately compose a single pattern or tapestry. There is, first, the group centering around the ducal nobility of Illyria: this group consists of Duke Orsino and his attendants, who open the play, and the Countess Olivia, who is the main topic of discussion of the opening scene. Then there is the group of shipwrecked personages centering on Viola and Sebastian, the twins, and their friends, Viola's sea captain who fades from the action, and, more important, Antonio, who plays a significant role later in the comedy. Both Viola and Sebastian are, of course, later absorbed into the nobility of Illyria. Then there is the merry group of pranksters, gullers, and tricksters, led by Sir Toby Belch and Maria; this group also includes Sir Andrew Aguecheek (who is included because his income supports the other members of this group), Fabian, and Feste, the Clown. Through Feste, all of the groups are connected by his free movement from one group to another as he is equally at home singing for Duke Orsino, or proving Lady Olivia to be a fool for so excessively mourning for her brother, or in planning a trick with Sir Toby. Then outside of all of these groups stands Malvolio, Lady Olivia's puritanical steward. His colossal vanity and egotism get between him and everything that he sees and does. Thus, he has already gotten on the wrong side of Maria, Feste, and Sir Toby, and the plot involving their determination to take their revenge upon him provides the best humor of the play.

Malvolio is socially and sexually ambitious; Maria realizes this and writes a letter purporting to come from the Countess Olivia, making Malvolio believe that his lady is in love with him and wishes to marry him; the letter also asks him to be firm and obstinate with her uncle, Sir Toby, to be arrogant to the other servants, and to dress in yellow stockings and go cross-gartered, and to smile all the time when he is near her. Malvolio finds the letter on the garden path and falls for the trick as he is watched gleefully by the group led by Maria and Sir Toby.

Viola disguises herself as a boy in order to protect herself and to obtain employment by Duke Orsino and quickly finds her way (as Cesario, the youth) into his favor; she is then sent to woo the Countess Olivia, much against Viola's will, for she has fallen in love with Count Orsino herself. Countess Olivia, who cannot love Duke Orsino, falls immediately in love with the messenger, Cesario, thus creating an amusing triangle which produces several complications. The arrival of Viola's twin brother, Sebastian (previously presumed drowned), sorts everything out matrimonially. Sebastian marries Olivia, Orsino marries Viola, and Sir Toby marries Maria for having played such an excellent trick on Malvolio.

This is one of Shakespeare's most popular, lightest, and most musical of all his comedies, and its staging continues to delight audiences all over the world.


The Idea of Disguise:

Act 1, Scene 1

Disguise 1: Olivia seems to want to disguise herself to the point of disappearing: her pain is that great. She, like Viola, lost a brother, and she wants to devote her entire being to his memory. She tries to use her body to mourn for him ("watering" his memory with her tears) and almost seems to be punishing herself by covering her face and staying away from other men.

Act 1, Scene 2

Disguise 2: Viola, for unexplained reasons, wants to escape from the world, so she decides to pretend to be a lowly male servant. Interestingly, she takes on this new, very different identity partly because she identifies strongly with Olivia, who is a woman with a similar temperament to her own.

Act 1, Scene 5

Disguise 3: The clown disguises himself as an idiot, but no one is entirely fooled. He seems to enjoy countering a seemingly ridiculous statement with one that appears profound. He is thus able to live as a fool while entertaining intelligent people like Olivia and Maria.

Disguise 4: The clown disguises his real and reasonable advice to Olivia in a speech that seems to make no sense. He effortlessly combines puns and wordplay with true wisdom, and plays the clown while also commanding respect from Olivia (he is supposed to be her lowliest servant, but he is giving her advice.) She tries to send him away, but she also calls him "sir."

Disguise 5: Olivia wishes to disguise her love for Cesario, so she tells Malvolio that Cesario left the ring with her, when she is in fact giving Cesario her own ring as a token of love. She assumes that Cesario will understand what she is doing and come back to woo her in secret, even though his job is to woo her on behalf of the Duke. Though she is unafraid to be honest about her feelings for the Duke, she is apparently uncomfortable with proclaiming her new feelings for Cesario.

Act 2, Scene 1

Disguise 6: Sebastian says that he and his sister looked remarkably similar, and since Viola has disguised herself as a man, she now (unbeknownst to any of them) looks exactly like him. This will account for much of the comedy later in the play. Mistaken identity and gender confusion are, of course, integral to the way the play develops.

Act 2, Scene 4

Disguise 7: Because of her disguise as Cesario, Viola is able to make a poignant speech about love and the nature of women. Orsino, a man, claims to understand women, saying that they are incapable of loving someone as deeply as men are. Viola knows this isn't true, because she has listened to Orsino complain about his love for days, while suffering silently herself. She tells Orsino that men might be more vocal in their declarations of love, but women are just as affected by love as men are. Her speech is all the more effective because Orsino doesn't know who she is, but the audience does.

Act 3, Scene 1

Disguise 8: Cesario sees that the clown, who plays a fool though he is surely wise in some ways, has more freedom than most people at court. A wise man who falls into foolishness is easy to criticize, but a fool who is sometimes wise is looked upon as very entertaining and even admirable. Thus the clown, who is probably just a normal man, acts like a fool and gets respect for it that he might never have had otherwise.

Act 3, Scene 4

Disguise 9: Viola's disguise has made her look exactly like her brother. Interestingly, the one who reveals this fact (thus unraveling both Viola's disguise and her separation from her brother, as well as Olivia's love for her and her love for Orsino) is Antonio. Antonio is perhaps the most constant, honest character in the play. While most of the characters treat their friends and lovers as means to an end or as part of a joke, Antonio loves Sebastian, and feels deeply betrayed when he thinks Sebastian has used him. His feelings are perhaps the deepest and most true of all the characters, (he never hides them) so it is no surprise that he ends all of the jokes and disguises.

Act 4, Scene 2

Disguise 10: While the other characters have disguised themselves for some purpose, both Malvolio and Sebastian have become "disguised" against their will. Malvolio has made himself appear to be a madman, and he acted the part so well that now he cannot convince anyone that he's sane. Sebastian, because he looks so much like Viola/Cesario, has been beaten, and has gotten Antonio sent to prison without any money. Both men are unable to change their situations or even understand what is going on, because they do not even realize they are disguised.

Major Characters:

Viola

Like most of Shakespeare’s heroines, Viola is a tremendously likable figure. She has no serious faults, and we can easily discount the peculiarity of her decision to dress as a man, since it sets the entire plot in motion. She is the character whose love seems the purest. The other characters’ passions are fickle: Orsino jumps from Olivia to Viola, Olivia jumps from Viola to Sebastian, and Sir Toby and Maria’s marriage seems more a matter of whim than an expression of deep and abiding passion. Only Viola seems to be truly, passionately in love as opposed to being self-indulgently lovesick. As she says to Orsino, describing herself and her love for him:

   She pined in thought,
   And with a green and yellow melancholy
   She sat like patience on a monument,
   Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
              (II.iv.111–114)

The audience, like Orsino, can only answer with an emphatic yes.

Viola’s chief problem throughout the play is one of identity. Because of her disguise, she must be both herself and Cesario. This mounting identity crisis culminates in the final scene, when Viola finds herself surrounded by people who each have a different idea of who she is and are unaware of who she actually is. Were Twelfth Night not a comedy, this pressure might cause Viola to break down. Sebastian’s appearance at this point, however, effectively saves Viola by allowing her to be herself again. Sebastian, who independent of his sister is not much of a character, takes over the aspects of Viola’s disguise that she no longer wishes to maintain. Thus liberated by her brother, Viola is free to shed the roles that she has accumulated throughout the play, and she can return to being Viola, the woman who has loved and won Orsino.

Orsino and Olivia

Orsino and Olivia are worth discussing together, because they have similar personalities. Both claim to be buffeted by strong emotions, but both ultimately seem to be self-indulgent individuals who enjoy melodrama and self-involvement more than anything. When we first meet them, Orsino is pining away for love of Olivia, while Olivia pines away for her dead brother. They show no interest in relating to the outside world, preferring to lock themselves up with their sorrows and mope around their homes.

Viola’s arrival begins to break both characters out of their self-involved shells, but neither undergoes a clear-cut change. Orsino relates to Viola in a way that he never has to Olivia, diminishing his self-involvement and making him more likable. Yet he persists in his belief that he is in love with Olivia until the final scene, in spite of the fact that he never once speaks to her during the course of the play. Olivia, meanwhile, sets aside her grief when Viola (disguised as Cesario) comes to see her. But Olivia takes up her own fantasy of lovesickness, in which she pines away—with a self-indulgence that mirrors Orsino’s—for a man who is really a woman. Ultimately, Orsino and Olivia seem to be out of touch with real emotion, as demonstrated by the ease with which they shift their affections in the final scene—Orsino from Olivia to Viola, and Olivia from Cesario to Sebastian. The similarity between Orsino and Olivia does not diminish with the end of the play, since the audience realizes that by marrying Viola and Sebastian, respectively, Orsino and Olivia are essentially marrying female and male versions of the same person.

Malvolio

Malvolio initially seems to be a minor character, and his humiliation seems little more than an amusing subplot to the Viola-Olivia-Orsino- love triangle. But he becomes more interesting as the play progresses, and most critics have judged him one of the most complex and fascinating characters in Twelfth Night. When we first meet Malvolio, he seems to be a simple type—a puritan, a stiff and proper servant who likes nothing better than to spoil other people’s fun. It is this dour, fun-despising side that earns him the enmity of the zany, drunken Sir Toby and the clever Maria, who together engineer his downfall. But they do so by playing on a side of Malvolio that might have otherwise remained hidden—his self-regard and his remarkable ambitions, which extend to marrying Olivia and becoming, as he puts it, “Count Malvolio” (II.v.30).

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When he finds the forged letter from Olivia (actually penned by Maria) that seems to offer hope to his ambitions, Malvolio undergoes his first transformation—from a stiff and wooden embodiment of priggish propriety into an personification of the power of self--delusion. He is ridiculous in these scenes, as he capers around in the yellow stockings and crossed garters that he thinks will please Olivia, but he also becomes pitiable. He may deserve his come-uppance, but there is an uncomfortable universality to his experience. Malvolio’s misfortune is a cautionary tale of ambition overcoming good sense, and the audience winces at the way he adapts every event—including Olivia’s confused assumption that he must be mad—to fit his rosy picture of his glorious future as a nobleman. Earlier, he embodies stiff joylessness; now he is joyful, but in pursuit of a dream that everyone, except him, knows is false.

Our pity for Malvolio only increases when the vindictive Maria and Toby confine him to a dark room in Act IV. As he desperately protests that he is not mad, Malvolio begins to seem more of a victim than a victimizer. It is as if the unfortunate steward, as the embodiment of order and sobriety, must be sacrificed so that the rest of the characters can indulge in the hearty spirit that suffuses Twelfth Night. As he is sacrificed, Malvolio begins to earn our respect. It is too much to call him a tragic figure, however—after all, he is only being asked to endure a single night in darkness, hardly a fate comparable to the sufferings of King Lear or Hamlet. But there is a kind of nobility, however limited, in the way that the deluded steward stubbornly clings to his sanity, even in the face of Feste’s insistence that he is mad. Malvolio remains true to himself, despite everything: he knows that he is sane, and he will not allow anything to destroy this knowledge.

Malvolio (and the audience) must be content with this self-knowledge, because the play allows Malvolio no real recompense for his sufferings. At the close of the play, he is brought out of the darkness into a celebration in which he has no part, and where no one seems willing to offer him a real apology. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,” he snarls, stalking out of the festivities (V.i.365). His exit strikes a jarring note in an otherwise joyful comedy. Malvolio has no real place in the anarchic world of Twelfth Night, except to suggest that, even in the best of worlds, someone must suffer while everyone else is happy.


Possible Exam Questions (Essay format):

1. Twelfth Night is based on a series of mistaken identities and disguises of one sort or another. Identify as many of the disguises as you can, and explain how each of them functions in the plot development.
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2. Describe the nature and type of love to which Duke Orsino is an easy prey.

3. Why does Duke Orsino use Cesario (Viola) to woo Olivia? Why doesn't he court her himself? Is it significant that Orsino and Olivia meet only once in the play and that this meeting is at the very end of the comedy? If so, why?

4. What qualities does Duke Orsino possess that allow Viola to fall in love with him?

5. Discuss Viola's use of her disguise.

6. Discuss the various changes that Lady Olivia undergoes during the course of the play. How can these changes be accounted for?

7. Relate the comic subplots dealing with Sir Andrew's and Malvolio's love for Lady Olivia to the main romantic plots.

8. How many separate plots are there? How can each be related to the other?

9. How does music function in this comedy?

10. How is Feste the Clown related to both the comic and the romantic plots?

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مرسل: الاثنين آب 01, 2011 6:16 م 
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شكرا عصام و ان شاء الله بيستفيدوا من الافكار الموجودة هون. و اذا بتعرف اسماء الاعمال الادبية اللي بتحب يكون في شي عنا هون يا ريت تقلي, لانو ما بعرف كل الاعمال اللي بتدرّس كوني ما بدرّس مواد ادبية بالعادة. و كل رمضان و انت بخير

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4- Dr. Faustus

PLOT:
D octor Faustus, a well-respected German scholar, grows dissatisfied with the limits of traditional forms of knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and religion—and decides that he wants to learn to practice magic. His friends Valdes and Cornelius instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Despite Mephastophilis’s warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells the devil to return to his master, Lucifer, with an offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service from Mephastophilis. Meanwhile, Wagner, Faustus’s servant, has picked up some magical ability and uses it to press a clown named Robin into his service.

Mephastophilis returns to Faustus with word that Lucifer has accepted Faustus’s offer. Faustus experiences some misgivings and wonders if he should repent and save his soul; in the end, though, he agrees to the deal, signing it with his blood. As soon as he does so, the words “Homo fuge,” Latin for “O man, fly,” appear branded on his arm. Faustus again has second thoughts, but Mephastophilis bestows rich gifts on him and gives him a book of spells to learn. Later, Mephastophilis answers all of his questions about the nature of the world, refusing to answer only when Faustus asks him who made the universe. This refusal prompts yet another bout of misgivings in Faustus, but Mephastophilis and Lucifer bring in personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins to prance about in front of Faustus, and he is impressed enough to quiet his doubts.

Armed with his new powers and attended by Mephastophilis, Faustus begins to travel. He goes to the pope’s court in Rome, makes himself invisible, and plays a series of tricks. He disrupts the pope’s banquet by stealing food and boxing the pope’s ears. Following this incident, he travels through the courts of Europe, with his fame spreading as he goes. Eventually, he is invited to the court of the German emperor, Charles V (the enemy of the pope), who asks Faustus to allow him to see Alexander the Great, the famed fourth-century b.c. Macedonian king and conqueror. Faustus conjures up an image of Alexander, and Charles is suitably impressed. A knight scoffs at Faustus’s powers, and Faustus chastises him by making antlers sprout from his head. Furious, the knight vows revenge.

Meanwhile, Robin, Wagner’s clown, has picked up some magic on his own, and with his fellow stablehand, Rafe, he undergoes a number of comic misadventures. At one point, he manages to summon Mephastophilis, who threatens to turn Robin and Rafe into animals (or perhaps even does transform them; the text isn’t clear) to punish them for their foolishness.

Faustus then goes on with his travels, playing a trick on a horse-courser along the way. Faustus sells him a horse that turns into a heap of straw when ridden into a river. Eventually, Faustus is invited to the court of the Duke of Vanholt, where he performs various feats. The horse-courser shows up there, along with Robin, a man named Dick (Rafe in the A text), and various others who have fallen victim to Faustus’s trickery. But Faustus casts spells on them and sends them on their way, to the amusement of the duke and duchess.

As the twenty-four years of his deal with Lucifer come to a close, Faustus begins to dread his impending death. He has Mephastophilis call up Helen of Troy, the famous beauty from the ancient world, and uses her presence to impress a group of scholars. An old man urges Faustus to repent, but Faustus drives him away. Faustus summons Helen again and exclaims rapturously about her beauty. But time is growing short. Faustus tells the scholars about his pact, and they are horror-stricken and resolve to pray for him. On the final night before the expiration of the twenty-four years, Faustus is overcome by fear and remorse. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. At midnight, a host of devils appears and carries his soul off to hell. In the morning, the scholars find Faustus’s limbs and decide to hold a funeral for him.


MAIN CHARACTERS:
Faustus

Faustus is the protagonist and tragic hero of Marlowe’s play. He is a contradictory character, capable of tremendous eloquence and possessing awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange, almost willful blindness and a willingness to waste powers that he has gained at great cost. When we first meet Faustus, he is just preparing to embark on his career as a magician, and while we already anticipate that things will turn out badly (the Chorus’s introduction, if nothing else, prepares us), there is nonetheless a grandeur to Faustus as he contemplates all the marvels that his magical powers will produce. He imagines piling up wealth from the four corners of the globe, reshaping the map of Europe (both politically and physically), and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility.

But Faustus also possesses an obtuseness that becomes apparent during his bargaining sessions with Mephastophilis. Having decided that a pact with the devil is the only way to fulfill his ambitions, Faustus then blinds himself happily to what such a pact actually means. Sometimes he tells himself that hell is not so bad and that one needs only “fortitude”; at other times, even while conversing with Mephastophilis, he remarks to the disbelieving demon that he does not actually believe hell exists. Meanwhile, despite his lack of concern about the prospect of eternal damnation, -Faustus is also beset with doubts from the beginning, setting a pattern for the play in which he repeatedly approaches repentance only to pull back at the last moment. Why he fails to repent is unclear: -sometimes it seems a matter of pride and continuing ambition, sometimes a conviction that God will not hear his plea. Other times, it seems that Mephastophilis simply bullies him away from repenting.

Bullying Faustus is less difficult than it might seem, because Marlowe, after setting his protagonist up as a grandly tragic figure of sweeping visions and immense ambitions, spends the middle scenes revealing Faustus’s true, petty nature. Once Faustus gains his long-desired powers, he does not know what to do with them. Marlowe suggests that this uncertainty stems, in part, from the fact that desire for knowledge leads inexorably toward God, whom Faustus has renounced. But, more generally, absolute power corrupts Faustus: once he can do everything, he no longer wants to do anything. Instead, he traipses around Europe, playing tricks on yokels and performing conjuring acts to impress various heads of state. He uses his incredible gifts for what is essentially trifling entertainment. The fields of possibility narrow gradually, as he visits ever more minor nobles and performs ever more unimportant magic tricks, until the Faustus of the first few scenes is entirely swallowed up in mediocrity. Only in the final scene is Faustus rescued from mediocrity, as the knowledge of his impending doom restores his earlier gift of powerful rhetoric, and he regains his sweeping sense of vision. Now, however, the vision that he sees is of hell looming up to swallow him. Marlowe uses much of his finest poetry to describe Faustus’s final hours, during which Faustus’s desire for repentance finally wins out, although too late. Still, Faustus is restored to his earlier grandeur in his closing speech, with its hurried rush from idea to idea and its despairing, Renaissance-renouncing last line, “I’ll burn my books!” He becomes once again a tragic hero, a great man undone because his ambitions have butted up against the law of God.

Mephastophilis

The character of Mephastophilis (spelled Mephistophilis or Mephistopheles by other authors) is one of the first in a long tradition of sympathetic literary devils, which includes figures like John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and Johann von Goethe’s Mephistophilis in the nineteenth-century poem “Faust.” Marlowe’s Mephastophilis is particularly interesting because he has mixed motives. On the one hand, from his first appearance he clearly intends to act as an agent of Faustus’s damnation. Indeed, he openly admits it, telling Faustus that “when we hear one rack the name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures and his savior Christ, / We fly in hope to get his glorious soul” (3.47–49). It is Mephastophilis who witnesses Faustus’s pact with Lucifer, and it is he who, throughout the play, steps in whenever Faustus considers repentance to cajole or threaten him into staying loyal to hell.

Yet there is an odd ambivalence in Mephastophilis. He seeks to damn Faustus, but he himself is damned and speaks freely of the horrors of hell. In a famous passage, when Faustus remarks that the devil seems to be free of hell at a particular moment, Mephastophilis insists,

   [w]hy this is hell, nor am I out of it.
   Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
   And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
   Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
   In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
              (3.76–80)

Again, when Faustus blithely—and absurdly, given that he is speaking to a demon—declares that he does not believe in hell, Mephastophilis groans and insists that hell is, indeed, real and terrible, as Faustus comes to know soon enough. Before the pact is sealed, Mephastophilis actually warns Faustus against making the deal with Lucifer. In an odd way, one can almost sense that part of Mephastophilis does not want Faustus to make the same mistakes that he made. But, of course, Faustus does so anyway, which makes him and Mephastophilis kindred spirits. It is appropriate that these two figures dominate Marlowe’s play, for they are two overly proud spirits doomed to hell.

DOCTOR FAUSTUS AS A MORALITY PLAY

Doctor Faustus has many features of a morality play: the conflict between good and evil, the creation of Good and Bad Angels, the Old Man as Good Counsel, the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins and the appearance of Faustus’ enemies to ambush and kill him.

The conflict between Good and Evil was a recurring theme in the medieval morality plays. From this point of view, Marlowe’s play is a dramatization of the medieval morality play, Everyman. Doctor Faustus becomes a morality play in which heaven struggles for the soul of a Renaissance Everyman, namely Doctor Faustus.

The Good Angel and the Bad Angel are characters derived from the medieval morality plays like The Castle of Perseverance. They are sometimes regarded as an externalization of the thoughts of Faustus. This is a twentieth-century view. The Angels are independent absolutes, one wholly good and one wholly evil. They appear in Doctor Faustus like allegorical figures of a morality play. They reflect the possibility of both damnation and redemption being open to Faustus. A close examination shows that the Evil Angel declines in importance as the play advances. The angles work by suggestion, as allegorical characters in morality plays do.
The audience also observes the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins in Doctor Faustus. This is another feature borrowed by Marlowe from the tradition of the morality play. In Marlowe’s play, to divert Faustus’ attention from Christ, his savior, Lucifer, comes with his attendant devils to rebuke him for invoking Christ and then presents the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins as a diversion.

Benvolio’s attempts to ambush and take revenge on Faustus is also a device taken from the medieval morality play. Faustus loses his head, only for it to be revealed as a false one. This theatrical device was originally used in the medieval morality play, Mankind. Similarly, Faustus’ attempt to strike Dick, Robin and the others dumb in the Vanholt show scene is also derived from the medieval morality play. Doctor Faustus has many features of the morality play of the Middle Ages.

TOPIC: The Duality of Man:

Duality of Man 1: Faustus is a doctor of divinity. But despite his great knowledge about the nature of God, he finds the dark powers of magic alluring. Ironically, it is his dissatisfaction with the limits of his knowledge of God that tempts Faustus to seek knowledge forbidden by God.

Scene 1

Duality of Man 2: Even as Faustus rejects the study of the academic disciplines, he realizes the limitations of man, especially the inevitable reality of death. In the bible, he finds that the reward for sin is death. For Faustus, it is difficult for him to reconcile the reality of death with his vague theological notions of eternal life; thus, he rejects divinity altogether.

Duality of Man 3: The Good Angel and the Evil Angel represent the voices of good and evil. As a literary device, the contrasts of the two angels reveal Faustus' internal struggles and the conflict between choosing what is right (soul or conscience) and following his fleshly (body) desires.

Scene 5

Duality of Man 4: Faustus begins to waver, as he hears a voice telling him to turn to God again. But Faustus flips the condition on its head by convincing himself that God does not love him, therefore, he will serve the god that truly loves himhis own appetite. Faustus' fleshly desires overcome his spiritual struggles.

Duality of Man 5: Just when Faustus seems to be focused on wealth and earthly desires, he continues to come back to supernatural matters. After having signed over his soul and body in blood, the first question he asks Mephistophilis is about hell. Even though Mephistophilis confirms the reality of hell, Faustus refuses to believe in it.

Scene 6

Duality of Man 6: Faustus contradicts himself many times. Before, he rebukes Mephistophilis for regretting having been cast out of heaven. This time, he accuses Mephistophilis of depriving him of the joys of heaven. Within a short time span, Faustus' soul moves back and forth between repenting before God and rejecting God.

Scene 13

Duality of Man 7: Here, there is not only a distinction between man's body and soul, but even in the way the two are treated. The devils can afflict a person's body, but they cannot touch the soul. The Old Man knows this, and therefore, he is confident that even though he might be persecuted in body, his soul will be able to stand against the devils if he remains strong in his faith.

Scene 14

Duality of Man 8: Faustus admits that his life of sin has taken its toll on both his body and soul. Not only is his body old and weary, but his soul has been tarnished to the point where Faustus feels he cannot repent.


Important Themes:
Sin, Redemption, and Damnation

Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world. First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus, however terrible Faustus’s pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12—both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience, or both.

Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.
The Conflict Between Medieval and Renaissance Values

Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this quotation does get at the heart of one of the play’s central themes: the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage.

Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship, beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology, quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine, the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were key. But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.

The play’s attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus’s pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.
Power as a Corrupting Influence

Early in the play, before he agrees to the pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the power that he seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to plumb the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. Though they may not be entirely admirable, these plans are ambitious and inspire awe, if not sympathy. They lend a grandeur to Faustus’s schemes and make his quest for personal power seem almost heroic, a sense that is reinforced by the eloquence of his early soliloquies.

Once Faustus actually gains the practically limitless power that he so desires, however, his horizons seem to narrow. Everything is possible to him, but his ambition is somehow sapped. Instead of the grand designs that he contemplates early on, he contents himself with performing conjuring tricks for kings and noblemen and takes a strange delight in using his magic to play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not that power has corrupted Faustus by making him evil: indeed, Faustus’s behavior after he sells his soul hardly rises to the level of true wickedness. Rather, gaining absolute power corrupts Faustus by making him mediocre and by transforming his boundless ambition into a meaningless delight in petty celebrity.

In the Christian framework of the play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with God’s blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not know what to do with it.
The Divided Nature of Man

Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment continually.

_________________
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مرسل: الثلاثاء آب 02, 2011 4:12 م 
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-Animal Farm

Summary:

One night, all the animals at Mr. Jones' Manor Farm assemble in a barn to hear old Major, a pig, describe a dream he had about a world where all animals live free from the tyranny of their human masters. Old Major dies soon after the meeting, but the animals — inspired by his philosophy of Animalism — plot a rebellion against Jones. Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, prove themselves important figures and planners of this dangerous enterprise. When Jones forgets to feed the animals, the revolution occurs, and Jones and his men are chased off the farm. Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm, and the Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn wall.


Initially, the rebellion is a success: The animals complete the harvest and meet every Sunday to debate farm policy. The pigs, because of their intelligence, become the supervisors of the farm. Napoleon, however, proves to be a power-hungry leader who steals the cows' milk and a number of apples to feed himself and the other pigs. He also enlists the services of Squealer, a pig with the ability to persuade the other animals that the pigs are always moral and correct in their decisions.

Later that fall, Jones and his men return to Animal Farm and attempt to retake it. Thanks to the tactics of Snowball, the animals defeat Jones in what thereafter becomes known as The Battle of the Cowshed. Winter arrives, and Mollie, a vain horse concerned only with ribbons and sugar, is lured off the farm by another human. Snowball begins drawing plans for a windmill, which will provide electricity and thereby give the animals more leisure time, but Napoleon vehemently opposes such a plan on the grounds that building the windmill will allow them less time for producing food. On the Sunday that the pigs offer the windmill to the animals for a vote, Napoleon summons a pack of ferocious dogs, who chase Snowball off the farm forever. Napoleon announces that there will be no further debates; he also tells them that the windmill will be built after all and lies that it was his own idea, stolen by Snowball. For the rest of the novel, Napoleon uses Snowball as a scapegoat on whom he blames all of the animals' hardships.

Much of the next year is spent building the windmill. Boxer, an incredibly strong horse, proves himself to be the most valuable animal in this endeavor. Jones, meanwhile, forsakes the farm and moves to another part of the county. Contrary to the principles of Animalism, Napoleon hires a solicitor and begins trading with neighboring farms. When a storm topples the half-finished windmill, Napoleon predictably blames Snowball and orders the animals to begin rebuilding it.

Napoleon's lust for power increases to the point where he becomes a totalitarian dictator, forcing "confessions" from innocent animals and having the dogs kill them in front of the entire farm. He and the pigs move into Jones' house and begin sleeping in beds (which Squealer excuses with his brand of twisted logic). The animals receive less and less food, while the pigs grow fatter. After the windmill is completed in August, Napoleon sells a pile of timber to Frederick, a neighboring farmer who pays for it with forged banknotes. Frederick and his men attack the farm and explode the windmill but are eventually defeated. As more of the Seven Commandments of Animalism are broken by the pigs, the language of the Commandments is revised: For example, after the pigs become drunk one night, the Commandment, "No animals shall drink alcohol" is changed to, "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess."

Boxer again offers his strength to help build a new windmill, but when he collapses, exhausted, Napoleon sells the devoted horse to a knacker (a glue-boiler). Squealer tells the indignant animals that Boxer was actually taken to a veterinarian and died a peaceful death in a hospital — a tale the animals believe.

Years pass and Animal Farm expands its boundaries after Napoleon purchases two fields from another neighboring farmer, Pilkington. Life for all the animals (except the pigs) is harsh. Eventually, the pigs begin walking on their hind legs and take on many other qualities of their former human oppressors. The Seven Commandments are reduced to a single law: "All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others." The novel ends with Pilkington sharing drinks with the pigs in Jones' house. Napoleon changes the name of the farm back to Manor Farm and quarrels with Pilkington during a card game in which both of them try to play the ace of spades. As other animals watch the scene from outside the window, they cannot tell the pigs from the humans.

Characters:

Mr. Jones: The farmer. In previous years, while he worked the animals hard, he used to be a capable farmer. Recently, though, he lost money in a lawsuit, became depressed, and started drinking heavily. He no longer gets much done and he spends a lot of time drinking and reading the newspapers in the kitchen.

Old Major: The prize Middle White boar, always called Old Major although at pig shows he was exhibited under the name Willingdon Beauty. At the time of his death he was twelve years old, quite stout and majestic-looking with a wise and benevolent appearance

Boxer: The male cart-horse, is very large and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together. He has a white stripe down his nose, which makes him look slightly stupid, and in fact he isn't highly intelligent, but he is steady, very hard-working and respected by all.

Clover: the female cart-horse, is very kind and motherly. She is stout, never having gotten her figure back after her fourth foal. She is devoted to Boxer.

Benjamin: The donkey is the oldest and worst-tempered animal on the farm. He doesn't seem to care who is in charge of the farm since he says it makes no difference in his life. He is very cynical, he seldom talks and never laughs. He is also very intelligent and insightful. He is devoted to Boxer in his own way, and the two of them usually spend their Sundays together grazing side by side.

Snowball: A boar. Vivacious, creative and quick in speech, but not considered as 'deep' as Napoleon. After he is expelled from the farm, Napoleon and Squealer identify him as the 'enemy' and blame him for everything that goes wrong.

Napoleon: A Berkshire boar (Berkshires are large, black pigs). He is rather fierce-looking. He doesn't talk much, but has a reputation for getting his own way. Later he becomes the Leader of Animal Farm and is hero-worshipped by the other animals.

Squealer: A porker, small and fat with round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements and a shrill voice. He is very persuasive, can convince anyone of anything, and when arguing a difficult point he has an almost hypnotic way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail.


The Dogs: Become the 'police' for Napoleon. Originally there are three dogs on the farm, Bluebell, Jessie, and Pincher. When Bluebell and Jessie give birth to nine puppies between them, Napoleon says he will educate the young puppies and secludes them in a loft in which he trains them to be his personal guard. The dogs become his weapon of terror, tearing out the throats of his political opponents.

The Pigs: The cleverest animals on the farm, find it easiest to learn to read and write and understand Animalism, and so they teach the other animals. They do not produce food by their own labor, but say they are the 'brain-workers' and become the leaders of the farm. Of the male pigs, only Snowball and Napoleon are boars (kept for breeding) and the others are porkers (i.e. have been castrated so as to be raised for meat).

Muriel: The white goat. She learns to read even better than the dogs can, and sometimes reads to the others in the evenings from scraps of newspaper which she finds on the rubbish heap.

Mollie: The white mare is very pretty and shallow. She loves sugar and plaiting her mane with ribbons, and she doesn't understand or care about political ideas.

The Cat: She is always looking for the most comfortable place to sleep and disappears whenever there is work or danger around.

Moses: The tame raven. He is Mr. Jones's special pet, is a spy and does no work - the other animals don't like him. He tells the animals about a special place called Sugarcandy Mountain where all animals go when they die. Moses likes beer - Mr. Jones sometimes feeds him on beer-soaked crusts of bread.

Mrs. Jones: The farmer's wife.

Pilkington: An easygoing upper-class farmer who lets his farm run down and get neglected, spending most of his time hunting or fishing.

Frederick: A tough, shrewd farmer. He is money-minded, drives hard bargains and is always taking people to court.

Minimus: A pig with a special talent for composing songs and poems, who becomes the official poet.

Mr. Whymper: The solicitor. He is a sly-looking little man with side whiskers, a solicitor with a very small business, but clever enough to realize before anyone else that Animal Farm will need a broker and the commissions will be worth having.

The Sheep: Probably the stupidest animals on the farm. They become Napoleon's most brainlessly devoted followers.

_________________
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مرسل: الثلاثاء آب 02, 2011 4:23 م 
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اشترك في: 28 كانون الثاني 2010
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القسم: English
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- The Awakening

Summary:
The Awakening explores one woman's desire to find and live fully within her true self. Her devotion to that purpose causes friction with her friends and family, and also conflicts with the dominant values of her time.
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Edna Pontellier's story takes place in 1890s Louisiana, within the upper-class Creole society. Edna, her husband Léonce, and their two children are vacationing for the summer on Grand Isle, an island just off the Louisiana shore near New Orleans. They are staying at a pension, a sort of boarding house where each family has their own cottage but eat together in a main dining hall. Also staying at the pension is the Ratignolle family; Madame Ratignolle is a close friend of Edna's, although their philosophies and attitudes toward child rearing differ fundamentally. Madame Ratignolle is the epitome of a "mother-woman," gladly sacrificing a distinct personal identity to devote her entire being to the care of her children, husband, and household.

In contrast to Madame Ratignolle's character is Mademoiselle Reisz, a brilliant pianist also vacationing on Grand Isle. Although Mademoiselle Reisz offends almost everyone with her brutal assessments of others, she likes Edna, and they become friends. Mademoiselle Reisz's piano performance stirs Edna deeply, awakening her capacity for passion and engendering the process of personal discovery that Edna undertakes — almost accidentally — that summer.

Another Grand Isle vacationer is the young and charming Robert Lebrun. Robert devotes himself each summer season to a different woman, usually married, in a sort of mock romance that no one takes seriously. This summer, Edna is the object of his attentions.

As Edna begins the process of identifying her true self, the self that exists apart from the identity she maintains as a wife and mother, Robert unknowingly encourages her by indulging her emerging sensuality. Unexpectedly, Robert and Edna become intensely infatuated with each other by summer's end. The sudden seriousness of his romantic feelings for her compels him to follow through on his oft-stated intention to go to Mexico to seek his fortune.

Edna is distraught at his departure, remaining obsessed with him long after she and her family have returned to New Orleans. As a result of her continuing process of self-discovery, she becomes almost capricious in meeting her desires and needs, no longer putting appearances first. Always interested in art, she begins spending more time painting and sketching portraits than on household and social duties. Léonce is shocked by Edna's refusal to obey social conventions. He consults Dr. Mandelet, an old family friend, who advises Léonce to leave Edna alone and allow her to get this odd behavior out of her system.

Edna continues her friendships with Mademoiselle Reisz and the pregnant Madame Ratignolle. Mademoiselle Reisz receives letters from Robert, which she allows Edna to read. Meanwhile, as a result of her awakening sexuality Edna has an affair with Alcée Arobin, a notorious womanizer. Her heart remains with Robert, however, and she is delighted to learn that he is soon returning to New Orleans.

She has grown ever more distant from Léonce, and also become a much better artist, selling some of her work through her art teacher. These sales provide her a small income, so while Léonce and the children are out of town, she decides to move out of the mansion they share and into a tiny rental house nearby, called the "pigeon house" for its small size.

Much to her distress, she encounters Robert accidentally, when he comes to visit Mademoiselle Reisz while Edna happens to be there. She is hurt that he did not seek her out as soon as he returned. Over the next weeks he tries to maintain emotional and physical distance from Edna because she is a married woman, but she ultimately forces the issue by kissing him, and he confesses his love to her.

Edna tries to express to Robert that she is utterly indifferent to the social prohibitions that forbid their love; she feels herself to be an independent woman. Before she can explain herself, however, she is called away to attend Madame Ratignolle's labor and delivery, at the end of which Madame Ratignolle asks Edna to consider the effect of her adulterous actions on her children. Edna is greatly disturbed to realize that her little boys will be deeply hurt if she leaves Léonce for another man. To this point, she had considered only her own desires.

When she returns to the pigeon house, Robert is gone, having left a goodbye note. Crushed, she decides to kill herself, realizing that she cannot return to her former life with Léonce but is also unwilling to hurt her children personally or socially with the stigma of divorce or open adultery. The next morning she travels alone to Grand Isle, announces that she is going swimming, and drowns herself.

Characters

Major Characters

Mrs. Edna Pontellier: Edna Pontellier is the principle character in the book who awakens to a new life as she discovers her independence. She is the young wife of Leonce Pontellier and the mother of the two young boys, Raoul and Etienne. During the summer months spent at Grande Isle, Edna learns how to swim, befriends Madame Adele Ratignolle, and falls madly (and secretly) in love with Robert Lebrun. During the remainder of the novel, she lives in New Orleans, spends time with pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, has an affair with Alcee Arobin, moves into her own pigeon-house, abandons her old life, and declares her love for Robert. When he leaves her at the end of the novel, Edna walks naked into the ocean, leaving the readership to wonder whether she has intentionally or unintentionally drowned.

Mr. Leonce Pontellier: Leonce Pontellier is Edna's wealthy, old-fashioned husband. Although he occasionally shows his love through material gifts, he more than often shows his frustration through anger. He finds Edna to be irresponsible, and elicits help from Dr. Mandelet as to her moody disposition. He travels to New York on business for a large portion of the novel, during which Edna moves out of the large house on Esplanade Street into her pigeon-hole and falls in love with Robert Lebrun.

Robert Lebrun: Robert Lebrun is the younger, attractive, flirtatious man with whom Edna falls madly in love. He is the elder son of Madame Lebrun, has had a scandalous affair with Mariequita, the young Spanish girl, runs off to Mexico on moment's notice, and breaks Edna's heart. Although he does sincerely love Edna, he leaves her twice without following through on his feelings.

Adele Ratignolle: Madame Adele Ratignolle is the epitome of perfect womanhood from this era, mother of five children, and ideal wife to Alphonse Ratignolle. She becomes a close friend and confidante of Edna while at Grande Isle and watches out for her dear friend in the ways of love. She warns Robert Lebrun to stay away from Edna. Although she does not attend Edna's farewell dinner because of illness, she cares deeply for Edna. Her final wishes to Edna are to think of her children.

Mademoiselle Reisz: Mademoiselle Reisz is the eccentric single pianist who charms Edna with her Chopin Impromptu at Grande Isle. She is a close friend of Robert Lebrun, who writes to her requesting a performance of Chopin for Edna any time she wishes. Mademoiselle embodies everything that Madame Ratignolle does not - independence, carefree attitudes about appearance, a single life with no children, and a life filled with art. Although Edna dislikes her at Grande Isle, she seeks her company and advice in New Orleans.

Alcee Arobin: Alcee Arobin is the young, charming, somewhat scandalous man who ultimately seduces Edna into his arms. He is part of the crowd in which Edna spends time in New Orleans, is a womanizer, gambler, and businessman.

Minor Characters

Raoul: Raoul is one of Edna and Leonce Pontellier's two young sons. He becomes slightly ill towards the beginning of the novella, causing Leonce to yell at Edna for being an irresponsible mother.

Etienne: Etienne is the other young son of Edna and Leonce Pontellier.

Alphonse Ratignolle: Alphonse Ratignolle is Adele Ratignolle's devoted Creole husband. He comes to Edna's farewell dinner representing the two and seeks Edna when his wife lays ill.

Janet: Janet is Edna's younger sister who gets married during the course of the novella. Edna chooses not to attend the wedding, despite their father's urgings.

Margaret: Margaret is Edna's older sister.

Mariequita: Mariequita is the little Spanish girl with whom Robert Lebrun had an affair before the course of the novel. She is scattered throughout the story and reminds Edna of Robert's possible torrid past.

Madame Antoine: Madame Antoine owns an inn where Edna sleeps after her fainting spell. She speaks only French and openly welcomes Edna into her rooms.

Tonie: Tonie is Madame Antoine's son, who helps Robert with the boat.

Dr. Mandelet: Doctor Mandelet is the elderly physician who is a dear friend of Mr. Pontellier and devoted doctor to several local families. He tells Leonce that Edna's mood will pass and that women are a moody species. He is late to the Ratignolle's during Adele's last moments and tells Edna that she should not be present during such a trying time.

The Colonel: The Colonel is Edna's father who was an officer in the Confederacy during the Civil War. He enjoys the parties, singing, dancing, and drinking at the Ratignolle parties and tries to convince Edna to come to his sister's wedding. He wonders why Edna and Leonce do not spend more time together at night.

Mrs. Highcamp: Mrs. Highcamp is a middle-aged society woman who busies herself planning her daughter's social life. She spends time with Edna, Alcee Arobin, and Mademoiselle Reisz in the city and at the races, and also attends her farewell dinner.

Miss Mayblunt: Miss Mayblunt is a young woman, no longer in her teens, that prides herself on intellectual banter and attends Edna's farewell dinner.

Mr. Gouvernail: Mr. Gouvernail is Miss Mayblunt's companion at Edna's farewell dinner.

Celestine: The solitary servant that Edna retains from the large house on Esplanade Street to her new pigeon house.

Farival Twins: The Farival twins dominate the atmosphere at Grande Isle with their obnoxious singing and ubiquitous presence. They are always at the parties and are never spoken of in high regard by Edna Pontellier or Adele Ratignolle.

Madame Lebrun: Madame Lebrun is the mother of Robert and Victor, runs the cottages in Grande Isle, and is friendly with Edna in New Orleans.

Victor Lebrun: Victor is Robert's younger brother and the treasure of Madame Lebrun. He flirts with Edna Pontellier and constantly tells her how beautiful she is. He also attends Edna's dinner and spends time with her crowd in New Orleans.


Themes

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

Solitude as the Consequence of Independence

For Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of The Awakening, independence and solitude are almost inseparable. The expectations of tradition coupled with the limitations of law gave women of the late 1800s very few opportunities for individual expression, not to mention independence. Expected to perform their domestic duties and care for the health and happiness of their families, Victorian women were prevented from seeking the satisfaction of their own wants and needs. During her gradual awakening, Edna discovers her own identity and acknowledges her emotional and sexual desires.

Initially, Edna experiences her independence as no more than an emotion. When she swims for the first time, she discovers her own strength, and through her pursuit of her painting she is reminded of the pleasure of individual creation. Yet when Edna begins to verbalize her feelings of independence, she soon meets resistance from the constraints—most notably, her husband—that weigh on her active life. And when she makes the decision to abandon her former lifestyle, Edna realizes that independent ideas cannot always translate into a simultaneously self-sufficient and socially acceptable existence.

Ultimately, the passion that Robert feels for Edna is not strong enough to join the lovers in a true union of minds, since although Robert’s passion is strong enough to make him feel torn between his love and his sense of moral rectitude, it is not strong enough to make him decide in favor of his love. The note Robert leaves for Edna makes clear to Edna the fact that she is ultimately alone in her awakening. Once Robert refuses to trespass the boundaries of societal convention, Edna acknowledges the profundity of her solitude.

The Implications of Self-Expression

Edna’s discovery of ways to express herself leads to the revelation of her long-repressed emotions. During her awakening, Edna learns at least three new “languages.” First, she learns the mode of expression of the Creole women on Grand Isle. Despite their chastity, these women speak freely and share their emotions openly. Their frankness initially shocks Edna, but she soon finds it liberating. Edna learns that she can face her emotions and sexuality directly, without fear. Once her Creole friends show her that it is okay to speak and think about one’s own feelings, Edna begins to acknowledge, name, define, and articulate her emotions.

Edna also learns to express herself through art. This lesson occurs in Chapter IX, when Edna hears Mademoiselle Reisz perform on the piano. Whereas previously music had called up images to her mind, the mademoiselle’s piano playing stirs her in a deeper way: “she saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body.” As the music ceases to conjure up images in Edna’s mind, it becomes for Edna a sort of call to something within herself. Additionally, Mademoiselle Reisz has felt that she and Edna have been communicating through the music: noting Edna’s “agitation,” she says that Edna is “the only one” at the party who is “worth playing for.” Once Edna is aware of music’s power to express emotion, she begins to paint as she has never painted before. Painting ceases to be a diversion and becomes instead a form of true expression.

From Robert and Alcée, Edna learns how to express the love and passion she has kept secret for so long. As with her other processes of language-learning, Edna finds that once she learns the “vocabulary” with which to express her needs and desires, she is better able to define them for herself. A pattern emerges—Edna can learn a language from a person but then surpass her teacher’s use of her newfound form of expression. For example, while Adèle teaches her that they can be open with one another, Edna soon wants to apply this frankness to all areas of her life. And although Robert helps to teach her the language of sexuality, she wants to speak this language loudly, as it were, while Robert still feels social pressure to whisper.

As Edna’s ability to express herself grows, the number of people who can understand her newfound languages shrinks. Ultimately, Edna’s suicide is linked to a dearth of people who can truly understand and empathize with her. Especially after Robert’s rejection of her in Chapter XXXVIII, Edna is convinced definitively of her essential solitude because the language of convention Robert speaks has become incomprehensible to Edna. Although Robert has taught her the language of sexuality, Edna has become too fluent. In this dilemma, Edna mirrors the parrot in Chapter I, which speaks French and “a little Spanish” but “also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird. . . .” The mockingbird, which merely whistles inarticulate “fluty notes” with “maddening persistence,” resembles Edna’s friends who seem to understand Edna but do not speak back.


Motifs

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

Music

Throughout The Awakening, the manner in which each of the characters uses and understands music gives us a sense of Edna’s ideological alignment in relation to the novel’s other characters. Additionally, Edna’s exploration of music and her meditations upon its significance enable her own (visual) art to flourish. Edna first learns about the emotive power of music from Mademoiselle Reisz. Whereas Adèle Ratignolle’s piano playing had merely conjured sentimental pictures for Edna, the older woman’s playing stirs new feelings and probes unexplored emotional territories in her. Mademoiselle Reisz uses music as a form of artistic expression, not merely as a way of entertaining others. In contrast to Mademoiselle Reisz, the Farival twins play the piano purely for the sake of the gathered company. The twins’ association with the Virgin Mary, and, hence, with a destiny of chaste motherliness, links them thematically with notions of how Victorian women should behave. Their piano playing—entertaining but not provocative, pleasant but not challenging—similarly serves as the model for how women should use art. It becomes clear that, for a Victorian woman, the use of art as a form of self-exploration and self-articulation constitutes a rebellion. Correspondingly, Mademoiselle Reisz’s use of music situates her as a nonconformist and a sympathetic confidante for Edna’s awakening.

The difference Edna detects between the piano-playing of Mademoiselle Reisz and Adèle Ratignolle seems also to testify to Edna’s emotional growth. She reaches a point in her awakening in which she is able to hear what a piece of music says to her, rather than idly inventing random pictures to accompany the sounds. Thus, music, or Edna’s changing reactions to it, also serves to help the reader locate Edna in her development.
Children

Images of children, and verbal allusions to them, occur throughout the novel. Edna herself is often metaphorically related to a child. In her awakening, she is undergoing a form of rebirth as she discovers the world from a fresh, childlike, perspective. Yet Edna’s childishness has a less admirable side. Edna becomes self-absorbed, she disregards others, and she fails to think realistically about the future or to meditate on her the consequences of her actions.

Ultimately, Edna’s thoughts of her children inspire her to commit suicide, because she realizes that no matter how little she depends on others, her children’s lives will always be affected by society’s opinion of her. Moreover, her children represent an obligation that, unlike Edna’s obligation to her husband, is irrevocable. Because children are so closely linked to Edna’s suicide, her increasing allusions to “the little lives” of her children prefigure her tragic end.

Houses

Edna stays in many houses in The Awakening: the cottages on Grand Isle, Madame Antoine’s home on the Chênière Caminada, the big house in New Orleans, and her “pigeon house.” Each of these houses serves as a marker of her progress as she undergoes her awakening. Edna is expected to be a “mother-woman” on Grand Isle, and to be the perfect social hostess in New Orleans. While she is living in the cottage on Grand Isle and in the big house in New Orleans, Edna maintains stays within the “walls” of these traditional roles and does not look beyond them.

However, when she and Robert slip away to the Chênière Caminada, their temporary rest in Madame Antoine’s house symbolizes the shift that Edna has undergone. Staying in the house, Edna finds herself in a new, romantic, and foreign world. It is as though the old social structures must have disappeared, and on this new island Edna can forget the other guests on Grand Isle and create a world of her own. Significantly, Madame Antoine’s house serves only as a temporary shelter—it is not a “home.” Edna’s newfound world of liberty is not a place where she can remain.

The “pigeon house” does allow Edna to be both at “home” and independent. Once she moves to the pigeon house, Edna no longer has to look at the material objects that Léonce has purchased and with which Edna equates herself. She can behave as she likes, without regard to how others will view her actions. In the end, however, the little house will prove not to be the solution Edna expected. While it does provide her with independence and isolation, allowing her to progress in her sexual awakening and to escape the gilded cage that Léonce’s house constituted, Edna finds herself cooped anew, if less extravagantly. The fact that her final house resembles those used to keep domesticated pigeons does not bode well for Edna’s fate. In the end, feeling alternately an exile and a prisoner, she is “at home” nowhere. Only in death can she hope to find the things a home offers—respite, privacy, shelter, and comfort.

Symbols

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

Birds

In The Awakening, caged birds serve as reminders of Edna’s entrapment and also of the entrapment of Victorian women in general. Madame Lebrun’s parrot and mockingbird represent Edna and Madame Reisz, respectively. Like the birds, the women’s movements are limited (by society), and they are unable to communicate with the world around them. The novel’s “winged” women may only use their wings to protect and shield, never to fly.

Edna’s attempts to escape her husband, children, and society manifest this arrested flight, as her efforts only land her in another cage: the pigeon house. While Edna views her new home as a sign of her independence, the pigeon house represents her inability to remove herself from her former life, as her move takes her just “two steps away.” Mademoiselle Reisz instructs Edna that she must have strong wings in order to survive the difficulties she will face if she plans to act on her love for Robert. She warns: “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”

Critics who argue that Edna’s suicide marks defeat, both individually and for women, point out the similar wording of the novel’s final example of bird imagery: “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.” If, however, the bird is not a symbol of Edna herself, but rather of Victorian womanhood in general, then its fall represents the fall of convention achieved by Edna’s suicide.

The Sea

The sea in The Awakening symbolizes freedom and escape. It is a vast expanse that Edna can brave only when she is solitary and only after she has discovered her own strength. When in the water, Edna is reminded of the depth of the universe and of her own position as a human being within that depth. The sensuous sound of the surf constantly beckons and seduces Edna throughout the novel.

Water’s associations with cleansing and baptism make it a symbol of rebirth. The sea, thus, also serves as a reminder of the fact that Edna’s awakening is a rebirth of sorts. Appropriately, Edna ends her life in the sea: a space of infinite potential becomes a blank and enveloping void that carries both a promise and a threat. In its sublime vastness, the sea represents the strength, glory, and lonely horror of independence.


Study Questions

1. What is the symbolic importance of the lady in black and of the two lovers? These characters often appear at the same points in the novel; what is the significance of this pairing?

The lady in black represents the conventional Victorian ideal of the widowed woman. She does not embark on a life of independence after fulfilling her duties as a wife; instead, she devotes herself to the memory of her husband and, through religion, to his departed soul. If Léonce were to die, a widowed Edna would be expected to lead her life in such a socially acceptable manner. Edna longs for independence from her husband, but the lady in black embodies the only such independence that society accepts in women: the patient, resigned solitude of a widow. This solitude does not speak to any sort of strength of autonomy but rather to an ascetic, self-effacing withdrawal from life and passion. It is as though the widow’s identity is entirely contingent upon her husband: the fact of his death means that she, too, must cease to experience the pleasures of life. Throughout the novel, this black-clad woman never speaks. Her lack of self-expression reinforces the lack of individuality underlying her self-governed but meaningless life.

The two young lovers are obvious mirrors of Robert and Edna, displaying the life they might have had together, had they met before Edna’s marriage. At several points in the novel, the lady in black follows the young lovers. Her solitude and mourning symbolize the eventual failure of every union and, thus, the imminent failure of Robert and Edna’s relationship.


2. What is the symbolic meaning of Edna’s first successful attempt to swim?


Paradoxically, Edna’s first swim symbolizes both rebirth and maturation. When she descends to the beach, she is described as a “little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who . . . walks for the first time alone.” Before her awakening, Edna is afraid of abandoning herself to the sea’s embrace, feeling an “ungovernable dread . . . when in the water, unless there was a hand near by that might reach out and reassure her.” Early in The Awakening, the sea is described as “seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.” The sea represents truth and loneliness, a vast expanse of solitude and vulnerability that Edna has long been afraid to enter. Her relationship with Robert has caused her to begin to develop and explore her own identity. As Edna discovers for the first time her own power, she begins her rebellion. Her swim in the ocean shows that she is no longer dependent on the help of others, as was expected of women, but instead finds strength and support within herself.

Before her rebirth, Edna was trapped in a perpetual childhood of feminine dependency. When she realizes that she is, in fact, swimming, Edna shouts, “Think of the time I have lost splashing about like a baby!” Edna’s shout of triumph symbolizes her shedding of the prolonged childhood forced on Victorian women. During the first six years of her marriage, Edna had resisted Léonce’s will only in momentary spurts, always eventually conceding and conforming to his authority. Now, however, she will no longer be ruled as a child. Becoming reckless and over-confident, she wants to swim “where no woman had swum before,” and she reaches out “for the unlimited in which to lose herself.” She extends her arms and explores the expanse of her new world.

Edna’s awakening is not complete with this swim though, for, looking back, the distance to the shore seems to her “a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome.” Dread of death seizes her and she realizes the flip side to independence: she can rely on nothing but her own strength to get her back to safety. Her failed attempt to swim far beyond the traditional waters of womanhood implies that Edna does not have the staying power required to withstand the consequences of defying social conventions.

One might read Edna’s quick exhaustion in the water as a foreshadowing of her death, which is brought about by a similar inability to fulfill her goal of transcending society. Or, her suicide may be read as her “completion” of her first swim. By the end of the novel, Edna comes to the realization that she has no place in the world around her, and her continued awakening and increasing acts of independence have given her the strength and courage she lacked during her first swim, the courage necessary to remove herself forever from the grasp of any other human being.


3. Early in The Awakening, the narrator remarks that Léonce thinks of Edna as “the sole object of his existence.” What evidence does the novel provide to support this declaration?

While Léonce continually expresses devotion for his wife and concern for the well-being of his family, he seems to hold a double standard regarding his and Edna’s respective roles in their marriage. Early in the novel, Léonce returns home late after a night at the club, but rather than allowing Edna to sleep, he insists on waking her to tell her about his evening. He expects her to perform the role of devoted audience, and yet earlier in the afternoon he had shown little interest in speaking with her, leaving to go to the club just after she had returned from her swim. It seems that Léonce invents a fictitious fever for one of their sons out of his annoyance with Edna’s disinterest—Edna finds nothing wrong with Raoul when she checks on him. When Edna returns from her son’s bedroom, Léonce proceeds to reproach her mothering skills. He upsets Edna and then falls asleep, leaving her to deal with her discontent on her own.

Though he means no harm in his treatment of Edna, Léonce is not entirely blameless. His sparse knowledge of his wife may be the result of his prioritization of work over family. During their summer vacation on Grand Isle, he spends the weekdays working in New Orleans, “eager to be gone” because he looks forward “to a lively week in Carondelet Street.” Furthermore, he takes a long business trip when the family returns to New Orleans, despite having been concerned enough about Edna’s behavior to warrant going to the doctor for advice. It is only in her husband’s absence that Edna truly changes, discovering herself and the pleasures offered by others.

Because he sees Edna as a possession and not as an equal, Léonce never makes an effort to understand her feelings, nor does he seek out her opinion on any matters. Moreover, just as one might choose one’s clothing or furnishings based on what they will “say” to others who see them, Léonce worries not about Edna herself, but about what others think of her and how this will reflect back on himself. He cares most about his social standing. For example, when Edna abandons her Tuesdays at home, Léonce warns her that she could jeopardize their place in high society instead of asking about the motivations behind Edna’s actions. Similarly, when he learns that Edna plans to move out of the big house, he does not express concern for her decision to remove herself from the family home, a symbol of their marriage and relationship, but worries instead about what the move might suggest to others about his financial situation.

Thus while Léonce does dote upon his wife and works hard to bring money into the household, it is really only her material well-being and comfort that he makes the “sole object of his existence”: he does not possess enough insight to worry about her emotional and psychological health. Indeed, insofar as Léonce regards Edna as a pretty pet and the finishing touch to the traditional household, one could read the above quote with a certain irony: for in Léonce’s eyes, Edna is indeed an “object.”

Suggested Essay Topics

1. How does the text use clothing and garments (or the lack thereof) to portray Edna’s rebellion against Victorian norms?

2. Of the many awakenings Edna undergoes in the novel, which are most important to her progress? Which may be considered “rude” or unexpected awakenings?

3. Explore the full implications of the various images of birds in the novel. How do the different species of birds mentioned—parrots, mockingbirds, pigeons—symbolize different ideas?

4. Throughout the novel, Edna feels caught between the way others see her and the way she sees herself. Identify several moments in which this struggle is apparent. How does the text portray Edna’s growing awareness of these contradicting views?

5. Some critics view Edna’s suicide at the end of the novel as a failure to complete her escape from convention—an inability to defy society once stripped of the motivation of a man by her side. Others view her suicide as a final awakening, a decision to give herself to the sea in a show of strength and independence that defies social expectation. Which interpretation do you find more compelling, and why?

_________________
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تحياتي

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