Literary Criticism

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

7:12 AM |

NOVEL:

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

Plot Overview

In the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy, discover a conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn to summon the other boys. Once assembled, the boys set about electing a leader and devising a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints another boy, Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for the entire group.

Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to death.

At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups and spend much of their time splashing in the water and playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting

When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire—which had been the hunters’ responsibility to maintain—has burned out. Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech intended to restore order. At the meeting, it quickly becomes clear that some of the boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys, known as “littluns,” have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally, asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea—a proposition that terrifies the entire group.

Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage in a battle high above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice the flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on the signal-fire mountain, dead. Sam and Eric, the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and hear the strange flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has attacked them.

The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at odds, travel up the mountain. They see the silhouette of the parachute from a distance and think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape. The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey, but before they have finished the task, most of them have slipped away to join Jack.

Jack declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters and organizes a hunt and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the occasion. The hunters then decapitate the sow and place its head on a sharpened stake in the jungle as an offering to the beast. Later, encountering the bloody, fly-covered head, Simon has a terrible vision, during which it seems to him that the head is speaking. The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the Lord of the Flies, says that Simon will never escape him, for he exists within all men. Simon faints. When he wakes up, he goes to the mountain, where he sees the dead parachutist. Understanding then that the beast does not exist externally but rather within each individual boy, Simon travels to the beach to tell the others what he has seen. But the others are in the midst of a chaotic revelry—even Ralph and Piggy have joined Jack’s feast—and when they see Simon’s shadowy figure emerge from the jungle, they fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth.

The following morning, Ralph and Piggy discuss what they have done. Jack’s hunters attack them and their few followers and steal Piggy’s glasses in the process. Ralph’s group travels to Jack’s stronghold in an attempt to make Jack see reason, but Jack orders Sam and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the ensuing battle, one boy, Roger, rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing Piggy and shattering the conch shell. Ralph barely manages to escape a torrent of spears.

Ralph hides for the rest of the night and the following day, while the others hunt him like an animal. Jack has the other boys ignite the forest in order to smoke Ralph out of his hiding place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and destroys the sow’s head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach, where he knows the other boys will soon arrive to kill him. Ralph collapses in exhaustion, but when he looks up, he sees a British naval officer standing over him. The officer’s ship noticed the fire raging in the jungle. The other boys reach the beach and stop in their tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at the spectacle of this group of bloodthirsty, savage children, the officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is overwhelmed by the knowledge that he is safe but, thinking about what has happened on the island, he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well. The officer turns his back so that the boys may regain their composure

CRITICSM:

Lord of the Flies is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read.

Through the entire story Golding does a great job of showing us all the similarities between each and every individual in society. Golding shows us that all mankind is, is a group of sniveling, fearful, kids playing at savages or playing at civilized men. Golding also shows that we will not be rescued until we are inches from rock bottom, after we've set our island on fire (perhaps in the manner of global warming) and have killed off reason.Lord of the Flies was driven by Golding's consideration of human evil, a complex topic that involves an examination not only of human nature but also the causes, effects, and manifestations of evil. It demands also a close observation of the methods or ideologies humankind uses to combat evil and whether those methods are effective. Golding addresses these topics through the intricate allegory of his novel.

For me, the most interesting thing was to see how human beings can change in extraordinary situations because I’ve never thought of this before. It was and is a completely new world and now I think that it is really important to think about such things, because something like that could really happen. Not exactly in the same way as in the novel, but I think something similar would be possible.It is also very interesting to follow the growing conflict between Jack and Ralph. Ralph, the protagonist, who stands for order and civilization, who does everything to keep their chances of being rescued intact, against Jack, his antagonist, who represents savagery, violence and the desire for power. In fact this sentence should be written the other way round it’s more Jack against Ralph because Jack doesn’t agree with the fact that Ralph is chief. Another important character, who makes the story more interesting, is Simon who seems to be goodness in person. Simon is the only one who never shows an evil side, because dark sides just don’t exist in Simon. His murder at the hand of the other boys makes us think more and more about the dark sides which seem to exist in every human being except Simon. As I read the part where he was murdered, I couldn’t believe what I was reading; it was really shocking – and still absolutely believable. That’s another reason why I really like this book.Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel, which means that Golding conveys many of his main ideas and themes through symbolic characters and objects. What Ralph, Jack and Simon stand for, I’ve already described a little bit, but now I want to speak about some objects. One of them is the conch shell. At the beginning, the conch becomes a really powerful symbol for law, order and civilization. As the boys are slowly descending into savagery, the conch loses its influence among them. With Piggy’s death the conch gets also crushed, signifying that civilization has been abolished, because almost all the boys have turned savage. Another symbolic object are Piggy’s specs, which represent the power of science and intelligence.

There are many other symbols to explain, but I just wanted to show that there are many things which give a certain meaning to the story. Also the very fast, surprising ending gives the story a special touch.

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NEW HISTORICISM

7:03 AM |

SHORT STORY:

Young Goodman Brown

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Plot summary:

The story begins at dusk in Salem, Massachusetts, as young Goodman Brown leaves Faith, his wife of three months, for an unknown errand in the forest. Faith pleads with her husband to stay with her but he insists the journey into the forest must be completed that night. In the forest he meets a man, dressed in a similar manner to himself and bearing a resemblance to himself. The man carries a black serpent-shaped staff. The two encounter Mistress Cloyse in the woods who complains about the need to walk and, evidently friendly with the stranger, accepts his snake staff and flies away to her destination.

Other townspeople inhabit the woods that night, traveling in the same direction as Goodman Brown. When he hears his wife's voice in the trees, he calls out to his Faith, but is not answered. He then seems to fly through the forest, using a maple staff the stranger fashioned for him, arriving at a clearing at midnight to find all the townspeople assembled. At the ceremony (which may be a witches' sabbath) carried out at a flame-lit rocky altar, the newest converts are brought forth—Goodman Brown and Faith. They are the only two of the townspeople not yet initiated to the forest rite. Goodman Brown calls to heaven to resist and instantly the scene vanishes.

Arriving back at his home in Salem the next morning, Goodman Brown is uncertain whether the previous night's events were real or a dream, but he is deeply shaken, with the belief he lived in a Christian community distorted. He loses his faith in his wife, along with all of humanity. He lives his life an embittered and suspicious cynic, wary of everyone around him. Hawthorne concludes the story by writing: "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave...they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."

CRITICISM

Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne chronicles the disturbing dream of a young Puritan man in Salem. In the dream, Goodman Brown comes face to face with evil and is forced to examine the nature of evil in man. He is disgusted by the evil he encounters, not realizing his own involvement. The meaning of the text lies in discovering the meaning of Goodman Brown's encounter in the woods.

Goodman Brown shows both innocence and corruptibility as he vacillates between believing in the inherent goodness of the people around him and believing that the devil has taken over the minds of all the people he loves. Finally, he believes that Faith is pure and good, until the devil reveals at the ceremony that Faith, too, is corruptible. This vacillation reveals Goodman Brown’s lack of true religion—his belief is easy to shake—as well as of the good and evil sides of human nature.Hawthorne suggests that behind the public face of godliness, the Puritans’ actions were not always Christian.

Commonly understood themes in Young Goodman Brown have included the pervasiveness and secrecy of sin and evil alive within all people, and the hypocrisy of Puritanism. The most obvious reading is that Brown, an innocent and naive fellow, is ruined after finding hypocrisy in his religious faith (embodied in his wife, Faith). His wife, as was often the case in Puritan New England, was seen as a representation of the domestic sphere and a pure being untainted by the evils of the world, so pure that she might even save her husband. Goodman Brown puts her on a pedestal, as he does his religion, but her appearance in the forest leaves him without hope for redemption and his eventual estrangement from her signals his true estrangement from God.

In many ways, much of this tale is allegorical in nature, partly because of the mutability of all of the symbols. If this were an allegory it could be summarized by stating that this is one man’s realization that he is surrounded by opposing forces without ever knowing which of them are good or which are evil. Faith (in both senses of the word) is the light in the story, the only way one can be saved, yet by walking into the forest (which is a symbol for that which is dark and mysterious) with a man who literally clings to the serpent (an allegorical image for the Devil or evil incarnate) Goodman is leaving behind his Faith and asking for the truth about who (or what) is good or evil.

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STRUCTURALISM

6:47 AM |

Movie:

Braveheart
Mel Gibson

Plot Overview:

In the 13th century, after several years of political unrest, Scotland is invaded and conquered by King Edward I of England (called "Longshanks" for his height) (Patrick McGoohan).

Young William Wallace witnesses the treachery of Longshanks, survives the death of his father and brother, and is taken abroad by his uncle where he is educated. Years later, Longshanks grants his noblemen land and privileges in Scotland, including Primae Noctis, the right of the lord to take a newly married Scottish woman into his bed on her wedding night. When he returns home, Wallace (Gibson) falls in love with his childhood sweetheart, Murron MacClannough (McCormack), and they marry in secret so that she does not have to spend a night in the bed of the English lord.

When an English soldier tries to rape Murron, Wallace fights off several soldiers and the two attempt to flee. But Murron is captured and publicly executed by the sheriff, who proclaims "an assault on the King's soldiers is the same as an assault on the King himself." In retribution, Wallace and several villagers slaughter the English garrison and execute the sheriff. In addition, he goes to York, allows one of the villagers to avenge his wife's sexual shaming from an English lord, and sends the occupying English garrison back to England. This enrages Longshanks, who confronts his son Edward about this: he then orders his son to stop Wallace by any means necessary. He also knows his son has a bisexual relationship going with his French wife Isabella and another man: momentarily ignoring this, Longshanks tells Edward "One day you will be a king: at least try to act like one."

Wallace rebels against the English, and as his legend spreads, hundreds of Scots from the surrounding clans join him. Wallace leads his army to victory at the Battle of Stirling and then sacks the city of York. All the while, Wallace seeks the assistance of Robert the Bruce (Macfadyen), the son of nobleman Robert the Elder and a contender for the Scottish crown. Despite his growing admiration for Wallace and his cause, Robert is dominated by his father, who wishes to secure the throne for his son by submitting to the English.

Longshanks, worried by the threat of the rebellion, sends the wife of his son Edward, the French princess Isabella, to try to negotiate with Wallace in hopes that Wallace kills her in order to draw the French king to declare war on Wallace in revenge. Wallace refuses the bribe sent with Isabella by Longshanks, but after meeting him in person, Isabella becomes enamored with him. Meanwhile, Longshanks prepares an army to invade Scotland.

Warned of the coming invasion by Isabella, Wallace implores the Scottish nobility, who are more concerned with their own welfare, that immediate action is needed to counter the threat and to take back the country. Leading the English army himself, Longshanks confronts the Scots at the Battle of Falkirk where noblemen Lochlan and Mornay betray Wallace. The Scots lose the battle, Wallace is wounded, and Hamish's father is fatally wounded and dies after the battle. As he charges toward the departing Longshanks on horseback, Wallace is intercepted by one of the king's lancers, who turns out to be Robert the Bruce. Remorseful, Bruce gets Wallace to safety before the English can capture him. Wallace kills Mornay and Lochlan for their betrayal, avoids assassination attempts, and wages a protracted guerrilla war against the English.

Robert the Bruce, intending to join Wallace and commit troops to the war, sets up a meeting with him in Edinburgh where Robert's father has conspired with other nobles to capture and hand over Wallace to the English. Learning of his treachery, Robert the Bruce disowns his father. Following a tryst with Wallace, Isabella exacts revenge on the now terminally ill Longshanks by telling him she is pregnant with Wallace's child, intent on ending Longshank's line and ruling in his son's place.

In London, Wallace is brought before an English magistrate, tried for high treason, and condemned to public torture and beheading. Even whilst being hanged, drawn and quartered, Wallace refuses to beg for mercy and submit to the king. As cries for mercy come from the watching crowd, the magistrate offers him one final chance. Wallace instead shouts the word "Freedom!" Just before the axe falls, Wallace sees a vision of Murron in the crowd smiling at him.

Years after Wallace's death, Robert the Bruce, now Scotland's king, leads a Scottish army before a ceremonial line of English troops on the fields of Bannockburn where he is to formally accept English rule. As he begins to ride toward the English, he stops and turns back to his troops. Invoking Wallace's memory, he implores them to fight with him as they did with Wallace. He then leads his army into battle against the stunned English, winning the Scots their freedom.

Criticism

Braveheart tugs on your heart and dazzles your eyes with brilliantly evocative images through its quaint beginnings, then grows deliciously dirty as the epic tragedy gains momentum with ferocious passion and chivalric resolve. William's vigor transcends into an effervescent blend of vengeance and strife for Scotland's freedom from this oppression. You see him physically become Scotland, living and breathing purely for their sovereignty and nothing else, and you heavily empathize with him. His following soldiers, meticulously portrayed by a host of strong character actors led by Brendan Gleeson as Wallace's childhood friend and David O'Hara as the crazy Irish fighter, unabashedly support him, both out of respect and out of his writhing sympathy for Murron. Gibson's ruggedly charismatic performance as Wallace keeps him appearing famished and desperate - but never with wavering force.It's an undeniably potent story, one with love and honor's boiling strength raging at its core. Aside the main love story, we get a taste of the inner conflicts within the English camp as well. The formerly French Princess of Wales, portrayed with incredible charisma by Sophie Marceau, struggles to build a relationship with her potentially homosexual husband, the Prince of England. She yearns for her own freedom from the reigns of different kinds of English oppression and, in connections with William Wallace, provides one of the few glimmers of purity and beauty through her aid towards the Scots.Full of layers and complications, Braveheart is surprisingly straightforward until politics litter the storyline in the final act of the film. Through the blossoming love and the exploding warfare, we're kept on the edge of our seat until the political agendas of other Scotsman lower our nerves. These complications, involving Robert the Bruce (Angus McFayden) and his family's lineage, are downshifted and intentionally slower in pace. Braveheart's fuming ferocity becomes throttled down amidst this, but in good ways that still maintain our interest. It gives us a breather leading up to the film's gut wrenching and evocative finale that, to upmost honesty, never ceases to swell a tear or two under these eyes.Braveheart rises up from being nothing more than a finely assembled picture through its strongly grounded disposition, fluttering humor, and amiable characters. Anybody can make a beautiful epic that achieves admirable potency; very few, however, can craft a three-hour story of love, malice, and freedom that breezes by with the drop of a hat and makes us want to come back time and time again for repeat emotional torment. It'll likely never lose that vigor in its gut wrenching core.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM

6:23 AM |

Novel:

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D Salinger

Plot Overview

The Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield. Holden is not specific about his location while he’s telling the story, but he makes it clear that he is undergoing treatment in a mental hospital or sanatorium. The events he narrates take place in the few days between the end of the fall school term and Christmas, when Holden is sixteen years old.

Holden’s story begins on the Saturday following the end of classes at the Pencey prep school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Pencey is Holden’s fourth school; he has already failed out of three others. At Pencey, he has failed four out of five of his classes and has received notice that he is being expelled, but he is not scheduled to return home to Manhattan until Wednesday. He visits his elderly history teacher, Spencer, to say goodbye, but when Spencer tries to reprimand him for his poor academic performance, Holden becomes annoyed.

Back in the dormitory, Holden is further irritated by his unhygienic neighbor, Ackley, and by his own roommate, Stradlater. Stradlater spends the evening on a date with Jane Gallagher, a girl whom Holden used to date and whom he still admires. During the course of the evening, Holden grows increasingly nervous about Stradlater’s taking Jane out, and when Stradlater returns, Holden questions him insistently about whether he tried to have sex with her. Stradlater teases Holden, who flies into a rage and attacks Stradlater. Stradlater pins Holden down and bloodies his nose. Holden decides that he’s had enough of Pencey and will go to Manhattan three days early, stay in a hotel, and not tell his parents that he is back.

On the train to New York, Holden meets the mother of one of his fellow Pencey students. Though he thinks this student is a complete “bastard,” he tells the woman made-up stories about how shy her son is and how well respected he is at school. When he arrives at Penn Station, he goes into a phone booth and considers calling several people, but for various reasons he decides against it. He gets in a cab and asks the cab driver where the ducks in Central Park go when the lagoon freezes, but his question annoys the driver. Holden has the cab driver take him to the Edmont Hotel, where he checks himself in.

From his room at the Edmont, Holden can see into the rooms of some of the guests in the opposite wing. He observes a man putting on silk stockings, high heels, a bra, a corset, and an evening gown. He also sees a man and a woman in another room taking turns spitting mouthfuls of their drinks into each other’s faces and laughing hysterically. He interprets the couple’s behavior as a form of sexual play and is both upset and aroused by it. After smoking a couple of cigarettes, he calls Faith Cavendish, a woman he has never met but whose number he got from an acquaintance at Princeton. Holden thinks he remembers hearing that she used to be a stripper, and he believes he can persuade her to have sex with him. He calls her, and though she is at first annoyed to be called at such a late hour by a complete stranger, she eventually suggests that they meet the next day. Holden doesn’t want to wait that long and winds up hanging up without arranging a meeting.

Holden goes downstairs to the Lavender Room and sits at a table, but the waiter realizes he’s a minor and refuses to serve him. He flirts with three women in their thirties, who seem like they’re from out of town and are mostly interested in catching a glimpse of a celebrity. Nevertheless, Holden dances with them and feels that he is “half in love” with the blonde one after seeing how well she dances. After making some wisecracks about his age, they leave, letting him pay their entire tab.

As Holden goes out to the lobby, he starts to think about Jane Gallagher and, in a flashback, recounts how he got to know her. They met while spending a summer vacation in Maine, played golf and checkers, and held hands at the movies. One afternoon, during a game of checkers, her stepfather came onto the porch where they were playing, and when he left Jane began to cry. Holden had moved to sit beside her and kissed her all over her face, but she wouldn’t let him kiss her on the mouth. That was the closest they came to “necking.”

Holden leaves the Edmont and takes a cab to Ernie’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. Again, he asks the cab driver where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter, and this cabbie is even more irritable than the first one. Holden sits alone at a table in Ernie’s and observes the other patrons with distaste. He runs into Lillian Simmons, one of his older brother’s former girlfriends, who invites him to sit with her and her date. Holden says he has to meet someone, leaves, and walks back to the Edmont.

Maurice, the elevator operator at the Edmont, offers to send a prostitute to Holden’s room for five dollars, and Holden agrees. A young woman, identifying herself as “Sunny,” arrives at his door. She pulls off her dress, but Holden starts to feel “peculiar” and tries to make conversation with her. He claims that he recently underwent a spinal operation and isn’t sufficiently recovered to have sex with her, but he offers to pay her anyway. She sits on his lap and talks dirty to him, but he insists on paying her five dollars and showing her the door. Sunny returns with Maurice, who demands another five dollars from Holden. When Holden refuses to pay, Maurice punches him in the stomach and leaves him on the floor, while Sunny takes five dollars from his wallet. Holden goes to bed.

He wakes up at ten o’clock on Sunday and calls Sally Hayes, an attractive girl whom he has dated in the past. They arrange to meet for a matinee showing of a Broadway play. He eats breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he converses with two nuns about Romeo and Juliet. He gives the nuns ten dollars. He tries to telephone Jane Gallagher, but her mother answers the phone, and he hangs up. He takes a cab to Central Park to look for his younger sister, Phoebe, but she isn’t there. He helps one of Phoebe’s schoolmates tighten her skate, and the girl tells him that Phoebe might be in the Museum of Natural History. Though he knows that Phoebe’s class wouldn’t be at the museum on a Sunday, he goes there anyway, but when he gets there he decides not to go in and instead takes a cab to the Biltmore Hotel to meet Sally.

Holden and Sally go to the play, and Holden is annoyed that Sally talks with a boy she knows from Andover afterward. At Sally’s suggestion, they go to Radio City to ice skate. They both skate poorly and decide to get a table instead. Holden tries to explain to Sally why he is unhappy at school, and actually urges her to run away with him to Massachusetts or Vermont and live in a cabin. When she refuses, he calls her a “pain in the ass” and laughs at her when she reacts angrily. She refuses to listen to his apologies and leaves.

Holden calls Jane again, but there is no answer. He calls Carl Luce, a young man who had been Holden’s student advisor at the Whooton School and who is now a student at Columbia University. Luce arranges to meet him for a drink after dinner, and Holden goes to a movie at Radio City to kill time. Holden and Luce meet at the Wicker Bar in the Seton Hotel. At Whooton, Luce had spoken frankly with some of the boys about sex, and Holden tries to draw him into a conversation about it once more. Luce grows irritated by Holden’s juvenile remarks about homosexuals and about Luce’s Chinese girlfriend, and he makes an excuse to leave early. Holden continues to drink Scotch and listen to the pianist and singer.

Quite drunk, Holden telephones Sally Hayes and babbles about their Christmas Eve plans. Then he goes to the lagoon in Central Park, where he used to watch the ducks as a child. It takes him a long time to find it, and by the time he does, he is freezing cold. He then decides to sneak into his own apartment building and wake his sister, Phoebe. He is forced to admit to Phoebe that he was kicked out of school, which makes her mad at him. When he tries to explain why he hates school, she accuses him of not liking anything. He tells her his fantasy of being “the catcher in the rye,” a person who catches little children as they are about to fall off of a cliff. Phoebe tells him that he has misremembered the poem that he took the image from: Robert Burns’s poem says “if a body meet a body, coming through the rye,” not “catch a body.”

Holden calls his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who tells Holden he can come to his apartment. Mr. Antolini asks Holden about his expulsion and tries to counsel him about his future. Holden can’t hide his sleepiness, and Mr. Antolini puts him to bed on the couch. Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini stroking his forehead. Thinking that Mr. Antolini is making a homosexual overture, Holden hastily excuses himself and leaves, sleeping for a few hours on a bench at Grand Central Station.

Holden goes to Phoebe’s school and sends her a note saying that he is leaving home for good and that she should meet him at lunchtime at the museum. When Phoebe arrives, she is carrying a suitcase full of clothes, and she asks Holden to take her with him. He refuses angrily, and she cries and then refuses to speak to him. Knowing she will follow him, he walks to the zoo, and then takes her across the park to a carousel. He buys her a ticket and watches her ride it. It starts to rain heavily, but Holden is so happy watching his sister ride the carousel that he is close to tears.

Holden ends his narrative here, telling the reader that he is not going to tell the story of how he went home and got “sick.” He plans to go to a new school in the fall and is cautiously optimistic about his future.

CRITICISM

Catcher is the type of book that makes me wish that I was with Holden the whole. Catcher in the Rye is the type of novel that I enjoy because of its humor, picturesque descriptions, and characterizations. When Holden introduced himself, he said that he's not going to tell us his whole biography. He wanted to let us understand that this book is a new type of novel. This novel would be much more different than the Great Gatsby or Charles Dickens' Victorian novels. Though he's the narrator, he is definitely not the protagonist or the antagonist. He also critizes his own essay in a very amusing way. Holden also has a heart and common sense. He also calls everybody ‘morons'. That symbolizes his hatred of everybody and the first step in his morbid condition. Ordinary People and Catcher in the Rye are two different stories, but they part of the same puzzle. Catcher in the Rye explained Holden’s internal emotions, while Ordinary People focused on Conrad’s family problems for him. Ordinary People build and strengthens the ideas of psychiatric problems for a troubled teen in Catcher in the Rye.

As its title indicates, the dominating theme of The Catcher in the Rye is the protection of innocence, especially of children. For most of the book, Holden sees this as a primary virtue. It is very closely related to his struggle against growing up. Holden's enemy is the adult world and the cruelty and artificiality that it entails. The people he admires all represent or protect innocence. He thinks of Jane Gallagher, for example, not as a maturing young woman but as the girl with whom he used to play checkers. He goes out of his way to tell us that he and Jane had no sexual relationship. Quite sweetly, they usually just held hands. Holden comforted Jane when she was distressed, and it bothers him that Jane may have been subjected to sexual advances from her drunken stepfather or from her date, Holden's roommate, Stradlater.

Holden's secret goal is to be "the catcher in the rye." In this metaphor, he envisions a field of rye standing by a dangerous cliff. Children play in the field with joy and abandon. If they should come too close to the edge of the cliff, however, Holden is there to catch them. His attitude seems to shift near the end of the novel when he realizes that Phoebe and other children must be allowed to "grab for the gold ring," to choose their own risks and take them, even though their attempts may be dangerous.

The end of the book demonstrates significant growth on the part of Holden. Although at first Holden is quick to condemn those around him as phony (like Stradlater and Ackley), his more recent encounters with others prove that he is becoming more tolerant and less judgmental. This is evidenced after the ordeal with Mr. Antolini, where Holden is determined not to make any conclusions about his teacher. This growth contributes to Holden’s fantasy of being a catcher in the rye. Despite his inability and fear of becoming an adult, he has found his role in keeping the innocence of other children protected. This is shown when he tries to scratch out the obscenities at Phoebe’s elementary school. He imagines himself on a cliff, catching innocent children (like himself at one time) who accidently fall off the cliff, bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood.

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FEMINISM

6:17 AM |

Novel:

“Nothing Lasts Forever”

by Sidney Sheldon

Summary:

Dr. Paige Taylor is on trial for the mercy killing of a patient (Did she off the guy for his fortune?); the action then flashes back five years, when Paige and two other female doctors meet as first-year residents at a San Francisco hospital. Paige is the dedicated one, Kate Hunter ("Kat") an African American whose aunt inspired her to lofty ambitions ("You can be anything you want to be. It's up to you") and Betty Lou Taft ("Honey"), the plain Southern belle whose diligent application of techniques gleaned from the Kama Sutra has assured her a professional niche. The trials and tribulations of both patients and medicos include suspenseful operations, natural deaths, murder and suicide

Criticism:

This was my first Sidney Sheldon novel and I am pleased to admit that despite my lofty expectations, I was not disappointed. In fact "Nothing Lasts Forever" is a fast paced, thrilling and riveting novel. I found it simply unputdownable and seriously can’t remember the last time I finished a 400 page book in a matter of two days. The way Sidney Sheldon builds suspense, from the very first page which opens right in the middle of a court hearing, where a certain Dr. Paige Taylor is being tried for killing a patient of hers who incidentally left behind a million dollars in Dr. Paige’s name, till the unexpected and dramatic ending, is quite brilliant.

Sheldon’s masterly crafted story also provides an insight into the hurly burly of a resident doctor’s existence. The long working hours, the low salaries, demanding and sadistic superiors, desperate patients, virtually non-existent personal life and the high pressure working conditions, make doctors’ life a never ending tale of misery and hardships. The author skillfully mixes drama, romance, mystery and medicine in this cleverly plotted novel. The characters, in particular the leading ladies – Dr. Taylor Paige, Dr. Kat Hunter and Dr. Honey Taft are beautifully drawn with intriguing and attractive personalities and engaging back stories. They are unique in the way they deal with challenges. While Dr. Paige is sincere and idealistic with firm belief in her convictions, Dr. Hunter is practical and focused, she also hates men, the result of a childhood of abuse, and Dr. Taft though kind, cheerful and compassionate is not averse to using her skills in the bed to move up the career ladder. The coming together of such characters in one story makes for an entertaining mesh.

All said and done this is one frenetic novel which leaves the reader glued from the first page till the last. The ending is the only weak part of this otherwise solid and enjoyable story. It is somewhat predictable and a little abrupt yet, it is still a satisfying and positive conclusion to the story. The characters and sub plots are tightly written, the pacing is fast and the writing extremely lucid and precise.

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MARXIST CRITICISM

5:26 AM |

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

PLOT OVERVIEW

Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. Nick also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan tells him that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responds by breaking her nose.

As the summer progresses, Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties. He encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls everyone “old sport.” Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan alone, and, through Jordan, Nick later learns more about his mysterious neighbor. Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and is deeply in love with her. He spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby now wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that Gatsby will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection. Their love rekindled, they begin an affair.

After a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby. At a luncheon at the Buchanans’ house, Gatsby stares at Daisy with such undisguised passion that Tom realizes Gatsby is in love with her. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into New York City, where he confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom asserts that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could never understand, and he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy realizes that her allegiance is to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him.

When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, however, they discover that Gatsby’s car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick reflects that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him “great,” Nick reflects that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby’s dream and the American dream—is over.

CRITICISM:

The book starts off a little slow and I wasn't quite sure what direction it was taking, but by the end I'm left with such a melancholy feeling I wanted to devour it again the minute I closed it. Yes, it has it's place as an American classic.In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald offers up commentary on a variety of themes — justice, power, greed, betrayal, the American dream and so on. Of all the themes, perhaps none is better developed than that of social stratification. The Great Gatsby is regarded as a brilliant piece of social commentary, offering a vivid peek into American life in the 1920s. Fitzgerald carefully sets up his novel into distinct groups but, in the end, each group has its own problems to contend with, leaving a powerful reminder of what a precarious place the world really is. By creating distinct social classes — old money, new money, and no money — Fitzgerald sends strong messages about the elitism running throughout every strata of society.Nick’s attitudes toward Gatsby and Gatsby’s story are ambivalent and contradictory. At times he seems to disapprove of Gatsby’s excesses and breaches of manners and ethics, but he also romanticizes and admires Gatsby, describing the events of the novel in a nostalgic and elegiac tone.Fitzgerald clearly intends for Gatsby’s dream to be symbolic of the American Dream for wealth and youth. Gatsby genuinely believes that if a person makes enough money and amasses a great enough fortune, he can buy anything. He thinks his wealth can erase the last five years of his and Daisy’s life and reunite them at the point at which he left her before he went away to the war. In a similar fashion, all Americans have a tendency to believe that if they have enough money, they can manipulate time, staying perpetually young, and buy their happiness through materialistic spending. Throughout the novel, there are many parties, a hallmark of the rich. But each festivity ends in waste or violence .Fitzgerald proudly tackles the theme of spirituality. His attack is subtle, making his message heard most forcefully by what is missing, rather than what is there. The world of The Great Gatsby is one of excess, folly, and pleasure, a world where people are so busy living for the moment that they have lost touch with any sort of morality, and end up breaking laws, cheating, and even killing. As debauched as this may sound, however, they have not abandoned spirituality altogether. Rather, Fitzgerald's post-war partiers have substituted materialism and instant creature comforts for philosophic principles, thus suggesting a lack of order and structure in the worlds of East Egg, West Egg, and beyond.

Fitzgerald presents a world in which value systems have gone out of balance. He is not espousing a heavy-handed Christian message, but rather he is encouraging readers to stop and take inventory of their lives. Although some may see Fitzgerald as implying a return to God is necessary for survival, the text supports something far more subtle: Fitzgerald is urging a reconsideration of where society is and where it is going.

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“Nothing Lasts Forever”

by Sidney Sheldon

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