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Why the First World War marked the beginning of Modern Age

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Why the First World War marked the beginning of Modern Age

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During the Victorian age there was great confidence in science and in progress, people thought that these would eliminate man's misery but the First World War, in which almost million British soldiers died,left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood. After the war only the upper classes obtained privileges. many soldiers, returned from the war, began to feel a sense of horror towards it, they were mentally and physically damaged by the war, the survivors in fact often suffered from shell shock. Therefore a feeling of frustration and rootlessness began to spread, also due to the slow dissolution of the Empire in Commonwealth. This feeling led to transformations,writers began to write anti-utopian works in which emerged the theme of equality between people. Nothing seemed be right, people could not find more refuge in science and religion,philosophers destroyed the false certainties on which the Victorian age had been based,for this reason new ideas emerged. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud  with his work “The Interpretation of Dreams” introduced a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams,also revealed the presence of an unconscious part in the human soul. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity upset the concepts of time and space. As a consequence the world view lost its solidity. Many people stopped believing in religion and intellectuals began to rectify their knowledge and this led the literature to be a guide in a time in which alienation and isolation dominated. Through literature writers expressed the chaos of that time.

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The historical changes and new trends in the 1920's in the UK

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The historical changes and new trends in the 1920's in the UK

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The tragedy of World War I and its tremendous cost in terms of human lives led to a profound change in people's attitudes to war and to the world in general. If at the beginning of the war the dominant mood was that of an aggressive patriotism,by 1916,after the loss of 20.000 British soldiers during the battle of Somme most people in Britain wanted the war to end as soon as possible. However, as history was soon to demonstrate the road to peace was still a long way to go. Apart from a brief period of optimism in the 1920's,known as the "roaring twenties" in the USA, the period between the two wars was a dark and ominous one. in spite of this a lot of reforms were introduced which moved in the direction of a more just and equal society. These included the 1918 Education Act which made school education compulsory for children up to the age of 14 and the establishment of a Ministry of Health co-ordinating health and national insurance. What made the inter-war years peculiar was the growth of new mass comunication technology. Radio in particular made information about events in the outside world more available to ordinary people and provided a means for establishing some level of social cohesion based on the shared experience of news and entertainment. Not only information but also culture began to be spread throughaut the radio and other means the most important of which was BBC. The British Broadcasting Corporation went on air for the first time in 1922. Together with daily newspaper like The Times,The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail it became an easy way to get information about what was happening in the world. Moreover,from the USA, cienema affected the human perception of reality as people learned to see everything through a camera lens. In this context there were other important social changes . Women began to partecipate in politics and tought for their rights in particular following the example of the suffragettes who had been striving for the right to vote since the first decade of the century. Finally the work of Sigmund Freud deeply changed the view of society which became more and more open. Freud's theories about the unconscious marked the literary production of some of greatest British writers of the time like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

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The First World War in S. Sasson's life & poems

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The First World War in S. Sasson's life & poems

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The war poetry of the First World War was written by soldier-poets who experienced war first hand and were personally affected by the horror of war.

Some of them survived but were psychologically and physically scarred for the rest of their lives. Sassoon is one of the most important soldier-poets. He joined himself the First World War and this had a big influence in his life. He went to fight in France and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery. At first he was motivated by patriotism, then the fact that he saw his brother dying and he got himself hurt brought him not wanting to go back to fight. Indeed after witnessing horrible scenarios, he declared himself a pacifist. Unfortunately he was sent back to war but he managed to survive. As his life was marked by emotional insecurity and periods of solitude, also his poems are characterized by the same feelings.  Sassoon had a number of key ideas that ran over them: the main theme that is expressed in nearly all his poems is the truth behind war - what really happens when you go to war and what you actually experience - nothing like what the media portrays. Sassoon hates the way the war is presented and the way the military and government deal with the war.

The collection “Counter-Attack” published in 1918 became famous for its bitter account of war. Sassoon was against the so-called Establishment that delayed the end of the war. His philosophy could be summarized with the expression “no truth unfitting”: he believed that everything have to be reported, no matter how horrific. His experiences in the field helped him to show aspects of the brutality of war. The short poem called “Base Detail” denounces the “hierarchy of war”. The senior officers who come from the higher classes spend their time during war confined to headquarters. There they are well fed and protected. While they lead a dissolute life and enjoy drinking, their men are sent to their deaths on the front-line. The senior officers don’t care about soldiers and they don’t have any interest in fighting for the nation. To Sassoon they look pathetic and disrespectful, especially when they are so drunk that they can’t even walk straight. Eventually, Sassoon with his irony and critical spirit enlightens that they die in bed and not in war like their soldiers.

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Sassoon began to write poetry before the war but soon became famous when his collection of anti-war poems,”Counter-Attack”, was published in 1918. All the romantic idealism of his early poetry had faded and this collection became famous for its bitter account of the horrors of war told by someone who had actually taken part. He took part in the war himself and he became an hero who was prepared to go on any mission. His experiences served to fuel his creativity as he focused on writing poetry which communicated every aspect of the brutality of war. His philosophy became “no truth unfitting”( the opposite of Victorian compromise), meaning everything had to be reported, no matter how horrific, in an attempt to wake up the public conscience from the dream of patriotic propaganda which it had always been fed. We have an example of this in “Base Detail”, this short poem denounces the “hierarchy of war” in which the senior officers, although also considered soldiers, spend the war confined to Base(or Headquarters) from which they are well fed and protected. In summary Sassoon shows the reality of war even though sometimes he’s forced to denounce the military system of which he  was part.

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The innovative characteristics of Imagism 

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The innovative characteristics of Imagism 

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The Imagist were part of an important movement in poetry founded in 1912 by the American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and a few other contemporaries in Europe.
The poets involved actually met and wrote papers about this movement and came up with three primary characteristics:
1) The poet must "simply present" an image
2) The poet "does not comment"
3) The poet should use the words necessary to paint the image, not to fit some type of rhythmic pattern (free verse)
Perhaps the best way to think of Imagism is to this of a photograph. The photographer captures a single, still moment in life.
The photo says something according to how the viewer looks at it and the meaning he or she puts behind it, not because there is a secret message in there from the photographer.
Pound, although one of the movement's founders, left the Imagist movement after it became too sentimental. Still, Imagism is considered highly influential as it provides the foundation for much Modernist poetry.

They claimed that poetry had to try to create clear, precise images in the mind of the reader and avoid any superfluous words.
The right image, they felt, would form a clearer idea for the reader and express much more succinctly what that poet wanted to say.
In order to do this they saw the need to bring poetic language closer to a more colloquial idiom so giving the poet greater freedom.
The Imagist rejected the traditional idea of poetry, inherited from the Romantics, according to which all poetry should be an expression of the feelings and personality of the artist.
They stated it had to represent things and experiences in an exact way and at the same time with a ‘‘union of thought and passion’’.
As a consequence the poetry of the Imagist was much less subjective as they felt that poet should ‘’de-personalise’’ himself in his work, allowing the work to speak for itself; it was the message the poem conveyed which was important and not the person who conveyed it.

T.S. Eliot was a follower of Imagism and having been encouraged by Pound, went on to write both and poetry and literary criticism until the 1960s.
Among his most famous poems are The Wast Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).
This last work was strongly influenced by his religious conversion to Anglicanism in 1927.
In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Much of the poetry of the 1920s was directly influences by T.S.Eliot and by the general pessimism and scepticism.

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The innovative principles of Imagism in the Preface to Some Imagist poets compared to the italian "Manifesto del Futurismo"

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The innovative principles of Imagism in the Preface to Some Imagist poets compared to the italian "Manifesto del Futurismo"

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Both Imagism and Futurism are literary movements complete with a Manifesto, that underlines and defines the most relevant points in the creative act of making art, if one’s desire is to follow the guidelines of these currents.

While analyzing the two manifesti, it is unavoidable to compare the different elements that both of them highlight and explain.

Imagism focuses greatly on the form and the structure of poetry, clarifying thoroughly how the words must be clear and exact, and the relevancy of free verse, highly required to create new rhythms. In contrast, futurism does not care about the body of the poem as long as it hits the reader hard. Violence and speed are all that is needed to write, poetry must be angry, aggressive and willing to fight. This is all that is given away from Marinetti on the matter of form and images in futurism. Nevertheless, the manifesto of Futurism explains in details which topics should be treated, focusing on how to overcome the past, that has to be destroyed. On the other hand, Imagism is all about freedom of subjects and ideals that may be described in the poems, only specifying that their image has to be clear, compact and definite.

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The lost generation was a group of writers that came to Europe; the name was invented by Gertrude Stein; they all shared the idea of dissatisfaction with American society.

The most important authors were Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemingway’s most famous novels were The Old Man and the Sea and Farewell to Arms, which it’s about love story between Frederic Henry, an American paramedic serving the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse; Frederic have to return to the front while Catherine is 3 month pregnant.

F.Scott Fitzgerald-s most famous novel was The great Gatsby, which it’s about the connection between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby and his social climbing.

The lost generation’s idea is closely related to American dream for the disappointment of the social structure.

Both of the novels share the difficulty of make decisions on their own because of state’s overwhelming power.

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“The roaring twenties “ in F.S. Fitzgerald’s life        

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“The roaring twenties “ in F.S. Fitzgerald’s life        

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The 1920’s, a time that is also known as The Roaring Twenties or The Jazz Age, was undoubtedly one of the rowdiest periods in the history of the United States.

Fitzgerald lived through this time period, so he used it in the setting of his novels because he was exceptionally insightful on it. Not to mention the fact that Fitzgerald is using experiences from his own life during the 1920’s. This time period s many aspects of life that if Fitzgerald had used any other time period except for his own, the telling of the story of Jay Gatsby would definitely not have been as effective.

This was the end of World War 1, and there was most definitely a very large sense of excitement. There was a new “modern way of living.” This was a wild and carefree time period. But, this also happened to be during the prohibition era. Because of people’s excess drinking and the growing problem of alcohol dependence, the government wanted to eradicate the temptation of liquor. Thus came the prohibition of alcohol. But, this did not stop people from drinking at all. There were still parties like Gatsby’s where there was an abundance of alcohol.

The incessant partying that characterized also Fitgerald’s life soon resulted in the couple becoming alcoholics but Fitgerald managed to continue writing.

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The Roaring Twenties in “The Great Gatsby”     

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The Roaring Twenties in “The Great Gatsby”     

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After its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby became soon a sort of “manifesto” of the roaring twenties. This was due to its many elements reflecting that controversial period so called “Jazz Age” too. First of all the desire to party right after the Great War, in fact Mr. Gatsby, hoping to see the woman he loved and had an affair with, Daisy, coming, he threw a lot of fancy parties in his big house. The fact that Gatsby thought that only showing wealth and economical stability he could regain Daisy’s love shows that social status and the influence of money became more and more important within society; also Fitzgerald values the role of colors, in fact Gatsby’s car is yellow to underline his wealth. Another Roaring Twenties element can be seen in Gatsby taking advantage of the Prohibition, establishing contacts with the organized crime and starting to smuggle, becoming richer and richer, and obviously corrupted because of money greed. Also the American Dream and its disillusionment is a very important theme: first of all because of the fact that both Gatsby and Fitzgerald move on from their poor conditions to try improving their career and then their delusion as their life go on and the end of the American Dream.

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby : a document of American society in the 20’s 

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby : a document of American society in the 20’s 

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F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896. Since childhood he perceived that the perfection of the class aristocratic concealed corruption and apathy.

In 1920 he married the young Zelda and, after a series of trips, set up home in Long Island, environment used as scenario in “The Great Gatsby”.

The Great Gatsby is a novel by F.S.Fitzgerald published in 1925 and considered a "manifesto" of the United States of the 1920s ,called Jazz Age whose great economic development will culminate in the Wall Street crisis of 1929.

The book focuses on the mysterious and ambiguous figure of Jay Gatsby, a self-made and rich man who, obsessed with the figure of his lover Daisy, symbolizes myths and contradictions of the “American dream”. The myth of the American dream is “it doesn’t matter who you are”.

All of Fitzgerald’s works focus on the “Roaring Twenties”. The industry is in full development thanks at the birth of new techniques of production, such as series production

of cars applied in Ford factories. Prohibition existed but it was a failing and impossible to enforce. Partying reigned and his novels are full of the glitzy, jazz spirit of the time when people really just wanted to enjoy themselves as nobody knew what tomorrow would bring.

Fitzgerald’s novels reflect not only this spirit but also the fashions in clothes and behaviour. Women had just been given the vote in America (1920) and the women in his novels seem to be really confident. They wore shorter dresses, their hair was bobbed and they drank and smoked as much as men. Fitzgerald focus on the world of the rich and, like himself, the new rich.

The novel “The Great Gatsby” is considered Fitzgerald’s best work. It is also autobiographical as the author describes a man (Jay) who, like himself, lived in Long Island, who accumulated wealth in order to regain her love, who lived a life of luxury and who finally died alone. Gatsby becomes a symbol for the 1920s for his hopes, his disillusionments, his wealth and his moral decline.

In the novel there are many themes, as already mentioned, the disillusionment of the American Dream along with the corrupting influences of money. The growing importance of status symbols is also apparent, very strongly in the film,  for example to be worthy of Daisy’s love Jay Gatsby needed the right car, the right house (symbols of his wealth).

There are also some symbol about colors: Gatsby’s car is yellow, gold, another link with his wealth; Daisy is associated with the color white , signifying fragility; there is a green light overlooking the water that Gatsby sees from his house, green symbolizing his hope to recuperate his love.

Links:

-New deal : in the two-year period '27 -'28 there is an increase in the production which not being required as originally, they bring down the purchase application by starting the Great Depression. In 1929 Black Tuesday: Wall Street crisis. In 1932 was elected Roosvelt, who, through the New Deal, wants to restore the economy.

-OSL (Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro) by Taylor. Absolute primacy of the company.

-Art: the importance of color.

-Italian: surrealismo, Italo Svevo con La coscienza di Zeno.

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Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: autobiographical elements 

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Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: autobiographical elements 

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There are a some autobiographical elements in “ The Great Gatsby”.

Nick and Gatsby, the two protagonists, bear the same energy and depth as the author himself, and there are a lot of examples:

1 The life of the author had been very painful and this pain is visible in the separation of Gatsby and his girlfriend Daisy.

2 Nick reflects the inner self of the author: it is not difficult to find the author's wisdom in Nick. He also has the same sophistication and honesty.

3 The author and Gatsby have the same addition: Fitzgerald used to drink heavily in his youth.

4  Some of the same spoilt nature and free spirit of Fitzgerald is visible in Gatsby.

5 Gatsby's life is just as traumatic as the author’s was. He too had been through turbulent situations. However, in his personal life Fitzgerald was a handsome and ambitious man as Gatsby was.

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Jay Gatsby: the controversial protagonist of F. S. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

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Jay Gatsby: the controversial protagonist of F. S. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

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Jay Gatsby is a mysterious man. His controversial manners make him an ambiguous and enigmatic person, whose efforts aim at regaining Daisy’s love, interrupted both by the war and by his poverty. Due to his poor conditions, in fact, he moves to Long Island and becomes rich by bootlegging alcohol illegally.

He changes everything, in order to forget his past and start a new life: his name (from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby), his behaviour, his way to speak, absurd and too elaborated (he always seems to choose the right words), his lifestyle only to impress a woman who is superficial and frivolous, only interested in money, and who doesn’t deserve him.  Even if he seems to be in love with Daisy he isn’t, he actually is in love with “the idea” of her and this “love” for her is what keeps him going on and living.

Moreover he is too generous and helpful, in fact everyone, in particular rich people, takes advantage of him, but when he dies nobody goes to his funeral.

The figure of Gatsby also represents the period of Prohibition, with his disillusionments and hopes that Daisy chooses him instead of Tom, in fact all parties he organizes are symbol of “The Roaring Twenties”, with alcohol, music and typical clothes.

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Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: analyse the characters 

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Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: analyse the characters 

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James Gatz is the protagonist of the story in fact his name made the title of the story.

James Gatz came from rural North Dakota ,he was born about 1890 into poor farmer family in fact we can define him a self made man. Jame Gatz's life changed when he met copper tycoon Dan Cody in little Girl Bay thanks to Cody he learned the ways of the wealthy.at 27 years old Gatsby met and fell in love with Daisy Fay and from here he never forgot her. He took part in the First World War, and when he received a letter from Daisy ,telling that she had married the wealthy Tom Buchanan,Gatsby decided to commit his life to becoming a rich man to win Daisy's love.

At the beginning of the story nobody knows who Gatsby is,he is a”myth “,everybody knows that him exists only for his mysterious and fabulous parties expression of the roaring twenties.

He represents at the same time “the hope” and” the illusion” of American dream, he tried till the end to become happy but he failed, he represents the failure of wealth and power.

He is an innovative character ,he is at the same time a strong man, capable of great things and a lover .

He also represents the blindness of love: he would do anything for Daisy without realizing that she is unable to love she is totally corrupted by wealth.

Gatsby is an exception in his society he still knows how to love , parties are only an intermediary (even if wrong) to have Daisy and not the meaning of his life, like for the other people of his time.

Nick Carraway grew up in family of”prominent,well-to-do people”in Chicago,he went to Yale, he likes literature ,he fought in the First World War ,in the end of the story he moved to work in the bond business, in New York City.

He is the first-person storyteller, he doesn't speak much about himself but we know him thanks to the way he talks.

He is a perfect narrator because he is inside the story he is the cousin of Daisy he is connected to wealthy people but he isn't one of them.

Nick often serves as a confidant for those with troubling secrets.

He is tolerant and honest he tried to never judge.

He is a good and silence observer, he is lucky when became the neighbour of Jay, because in the story he said that he only envies Gatsby he is like fascinated and obsessed by Gatsby. In fact Nick said about Gatsby :”it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”.

Nick at the top of the story said: “i'm inclined to reserve all judgements” is like a declaration to the reader that he is a cautious, thoughtful and reliable narrator but sometimes even for him it is so difficult  not to judge particularly in the context in which he lives , he also clearly declare his work like a narrator when he said:” i 'm at the same time inside and outside the story” he doesn't just narrate the story but takes part in parties and conversation ,and he is essential in the story between Gatsby and Daisy.

Tom Buchan

Tom buchan is Daisy's husband is hyper-masculine,aggressive and super rich man.

He is Gatsby's rival for Daisy's love but Tom cheats on Daisy because he is also caught up in an affair with Myrtle Wilson another negative characters . He met Nick at university and he is happy when he meet him again.

Tom is a superficial man who thinks he can get everything with money.

He is arrogant and racist but he think to be cultured and interesting,Tom has been doing some light reading and he is obsessed with the idea that the “lesser races” are going to pollute the “Nordic”

his racism can be synthesized here , he said :” if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly submerged “

His humanity is only captured at the end of the story , in his shinig eyes,when he saw his lover dead.

Daisy Buchanan

she is Tom's wife and Gatsby's lover; she lives an unhappy marriage.

she represents the suffering joy and illusion of Gatsby and she is the meaning of the book,

everything revolves around her.

Gastby is obsessed with her, she looks like a fatal woman that in fact will lead him indirectly to death. She is like a nightmare dressed like a daydream.

She marries Tom because that's what she had to do ,just a very rich snob with a arrogant and rich man.

She is careless , she is indecisive she literally drives Tom and Gastby crazy (until the physical confrontation) with her delicate indecision.

She is unable to love and wait for Gastby she is corrupted.

She lives in a apparently perfect life but she is unhappy and bored

"I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool….You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow….And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. “

Myrtle Wilson

She is Tom's mistress , she lives in “Valley of Ashes” she is snobby and attracted to dominant men like Tom, she is rude and she attracts men with her body. Gatsby and Myrtle unexpectedly have something in common ,their attempt to rise above their status. Exactly like Tom she talks about “lower orders” like she 's not one of them.

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: the role of Nick Carraway   

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: the role of Nick Carraway   

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Nick is within and without the story and he plays a secondary role.

Nick is the narrator of the novel, because of his personality. In fact, he is tolerant, open-minded, quiet, and a good listener. He represents a part of Fitzgerald (Gatsby represents the other one). He’s thirty and he lives in the West Egg district of Long Island, next door to Gatsby. Nick is also Daisy’s cousin, so he helps Gatsby to conquer her. He has an internal conflict that he does not resolve until the end of the book. On the one hand, Nick is attracted to the fast-paced, fun-driven lifestyle of New York. On the other hand, he finds that lifestyle grotesque and damaging. This inner conflict is symbolized throughout the book by Nick’s romantic affair with Jordan Baker. He is attracted to her vivacity and her sophistication just as he is repelled by her dishonesty and her lack of consideration for other people. He’s very different from Daisy and the other superficial characters. At the end of the story Gatsby is killed. Nick and Gatsby’s father are the only ones at the funeral. In that moment he resolves his conflict. He understands the corruption of all the other characters, their selfishness and their indifference (this is Fitzgerald’s vision of the society). So, Nick returns to Minnesota in search of a quieter life structured by more traditional moral values.

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”: style & structure 

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”: style & structure 

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Without a doubt, “The Great Gatsby” is one of the masterpieces of American literature.The novel was first published in 1925 by the Minnesota writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald. In this work the author reflected events of his current life, hiding behind a front of luxury and partying, a deep state of loneliness. We can find autobiographical references scattered throughout the entire writing, starting from the protagonist himself, Gatsby, a New-Yorker who accumulated fortune to conquer the woman who rejected him because of his previous poverty. In the end he will try to cure his loneliness by giving luxurious parties every day and drinking his life away until he finally dies in complete solitude.
The style chosen by Fitzgerald gives a very realistic picture, he uses a descriptive yet poetic language and alternates between long stretches of narration and authentic-feeling dialogues. Due to his ability to fluidly move from one scene to another, his style is often defined cinematographic.
The novel is entirely narrated by Nick Carraway, a Mid-Western who moved right next door to Gatsby. He is a spectator to the events that unfold in front of him, acting as a perfect witness-narrator. It is also important to note that he is an outsider to the lively New York lifestyle, so all of the actions and words he sees are related to the reader after being filtered by his opinions.
The attention to the structure is another important detail worth mentioning. Fitzgerald made sure to make it perfectly balanced, setting his novel in a very definite time frame. The novel starts off in Spring 1922 with Nick’s arrive in Long Island, passing through the moment of ultimate climax, the meeting between Daisy and Gatsby, and ends with the protagonist’s lonely death in Autumn.

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: narrative technique -

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F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: narrative technique -

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Fitzgerald’s style has always been defined “cinematographic”. It is so called because of some typical characteristics: a descriptive and poetic language, controlled dialogues and a very particular from a scene to another one, almost like he was a writer-director.

In The Great Gatsby, the narrator is Nick Carraway. He is not a New Yorker, so he can analyze the situations he sees as an outsider; in addition, every event is filtered through his point of view. By this way, the reader (or viewer) enters the story for real and empathizes with the narrator, who behaves almost as co-protagonist due to his importance inside the story.

The structure of The Great Gatsby is really interesting: from the beginning to the half (the meeting between Gatsby and Daisy), it is based on an ascending climax. The second half is exactly opposite, ending with the death of Gatsby.

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The American Dream in The Great Gatsby by F.S. Fitzgerald   

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The American Dream in The Great Gatsby by F.S. Fitzgerald   

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In the twentieth century society the target of everyone is to become rich. This is the American Dream, the belief that each man can get whatever he wants.

The so-called “American Dream” expresses a set of ideals, such as freedom, liberty, equality, democracy and opportunity, where freedom includes the possibility of prosperity and success, as well as high social mobility for family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with a few barriers. The concept of American Dream is clearly present in the Declaration of Independence that says: “All men are created equal” with the right to “life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness”. The acquisition of a substantial welfare shows that, if you have talent, intelligence and perseverance to work hard, you’ll be successful in life.

In the 1920s, the American Dream started to change from the pursuit of a better life to the desire to accumulate material things. This is described by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

Gatsby, the main character, has the gift of hope; he can wait with confidence and he is willing to work hard in order to fulfil his greatest aspiration: a future of happiness. This novel is the most effective symbol of both the roaring Twenties and the American Dream, but it also shows that earning money was very easy at the time, and nobody cared about the way it was made. Therefore, the dream of Gatsby matches the American Dream, a dream considered incorruptible; but in his novel Fitzgerald shows that money, excessive freedom and power do not always bring happiness indeed. The story of Gatsby expresses the disillusionment of this dream and, as a matter of fact, the novel ends in a dramatic way, with the death of its main character.

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F. S. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby & Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby: comparison 

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F. S. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby & Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby: comparison 

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Baz Luhrmann tries to stay faithful to the book, but he still gives his own vision to the final cinematographic product.

There are some substantial differences, especially the portraits of some characters are quite changed. For example Daisy in the film is a lot more shallow and soulless than how she is in the book.

However the key points are the same in the film and in the book, the director even  recreates some dialogues as they’re written in the novel.

Fitzgerald’s elegant and cinematographic style reflects into the style of the film.

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is loud and noisy, as in Luhrmann’s other films, everything is fast and frenetic. He in his film emphasizes everything from the costumes to the colours, from the lights to the scenography. He does what a screenwriter often does: he shows, he doesn’t tell, letting the power of images describes the dissolution of those years.

Fitzgerald describes the excessive society of the 20s as Luhrmann describes the glamorous american society of the second decade of the XXI century, while showing a modern portrait of the Jazz Age.

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At the age of seventeen, driven by an irresistible vocation for sea life, he left for Marseille, where he embarked as a simple sailor. Navigating meant for him to know above all the maritime world which was also identified in trafficking, smuggling, men who embarked to escape. In short, it meant meeting worlds that were, not only geographically, at the antipodes of civil Europe. After a long experience, he served in the French merchant navy and, from 1878, in the British one.
In 1886, he successfully passed the captain's exam and became an English citizen. Conrad soon combines the training and experience of the sailor with a true top-of-the-range culture: Dostoevsky is his usual reading while learning literary English by reading Shakespeare during the breaks that left him his life as a sailor, which brought him between Great Britain, Australia and the Indies. For a few years he practiced cabotage on the Indian ocean.
Following a sentimental disappointment, he returned to London where, in 1889, he began writing Almayer's folly, of which he stopped editing to take command of a ship that was to sail up the high Congo. Suffering from rheumatism, he had to return to England in 1894. The success of Almayer's folly (published in 1895) convinced him to continue writing.Married in 1896, he settled in England and devoted himself to literature until his death.

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The novel Heart of Darkness was written in 1902 by Joseph Conrad, that took inspiration from his long journey in the Belgian Congo. The word Darkness in the title is a source of symbols inside the novel, but his principal meaning is correlated to the evil that predominated his contemporary society, thirsty for power and wealth.

Heart of Darkness is a journey in the mystery, it is the story of an absurd obsession. Kurtz, the protagonist, enters the world of darkness and doesn’t go out of it. His living in the heart of the forest, the big quantity of ivory that he sends to his Company, the adoration that the natives feel for him and his desire to become an idol for them are all things that leave a sense of anguish. He is the man that wants to overcome human limits to become animal and at the same time God.

It is a journey to hell, and the sense that the reading of this book leaves is that of darkness and discomfort. It is a journey into the consciousness, in which the civilized man, moved away from society, discovers that he is wilder and more instinctive than rational, and even more cruel than the natives. Readers identify themselves in Marlow, that represents the desire of freedom and, with his inertia, the horrors of colonialism slide on him. His journey represents that of the mythical hero, who has to face obstacles and challenges to gain self-awareness (as Odisseo in Odissea, as Enea in Eneide and as Dante in the Divina Commedia).

The darkness is also correlated to colonialism: “white” men bring darkness to “black” men of African world, with the exploitation of the natives for their “white” gold, the ivory. Here, from the point of view of symbolism, there is the opposition between black and white and between light and shadow. At the beginning light represents the good and shadow the evil; but, when the African world and the jungle arrive to identify with darkness, the connotations are exchanged: thus the light and white are associated to negative aspects of colonialism.

The author is very critical towards colonizers and casts doubt on the meaning of the term “civilisation”; the Darkness is that of the Western world, of London, where the protagonist turns back at the end, that hides behind a false moral of progress the destruction and the exploitation of other cultures. “The Horror! The Horror!”, the exclamation of Kurtz when he is dying, most likely refers to this terrible behavior.

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The theme of the double in Heart of Darkness and in The Great Gatsby 

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The theme of the double in Heart of Darkness and in The Great Gatsby 

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In Heart of Darkness we can find the theme of the double in the relationship between light and darkness, which is reflected throughout the whole book.

The light is pictured by the European world and the western societies, so by white people who felt the duty to enter in the depth of the African forest trying to civilize the primitive countries. The darkness is represented by the black people who live in the dark jungle of Africa.
Although it’s hard to  define where the ‘light’ ends and the ‘darkness’ begins, since the white people,  that should be positive figures, dirtied their souls with evil, since they are lead by the greed for power and wealth and they brought horrors to the jungle to obtain the ‘white gold’, ivory. The protagonist Kurtz himself, that Marlow imagines to be the perfect respectable white man, the successful example of the western civilization, ends up to be a savage who accepted to live like the African natives in a hut decorated by human skulls and the god-like treatment he is given.

Also in The Great Gatsby there’s underlined the double face of appearance and actual reality: the main character, Gatsby, is surrounded by an halo of perplexity. His own name is a sign of his double existence: he once was James Gatz, a poor child born in mid west, but once he got rich he changed his identity and became Jay Gatsby; He seems a respectable man, who achieved his position of power working hard, even though the stories he tells about his life seems unbelievable,  whereas he actually took advantage of bootlegging to obtain wealth. The higher example of the double images of mister Gatsby is the description of the pompous and exaggerated parties the had thrown at his house, chaotic, joyful and full of people of every kind, compared to the scene of Gatsby’s funeral, where none of the ones invited to the parties shown up, not even Daisy, excepted Nick and his father, strong reminder of who he once was, James Gatz.

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Themes:

One of the most important themes in Conrad’s novel is imperialism, that is hidden in the slogan of spreading civilisation. For example Kurtz is in Congo pretended to civilize the people and was engaged in the ivory trade and involved in horrific ancient rituals of sacrificing humans to appease the native Africans. Marlow describes the ravages of imperialism during his journey to the heart of Africa.

Another dominant theme is colonialism seen as a source of exploitation and evil: Marlow doesn’t  accept the amount of brutal exploitation that happened in the name of trade.

This is only mentioned in oblique such as “the horror”, this causes death to locals.

In a way the novel asks the question: “who is really primitive and who can claim to be civilised?”

With “Heart of Darkness” Conrad is questioning the values of western societies based on power and material gain, and he wants also to underline the discepancy betweens ideals and realism.

After Conrad, other writers will develop his ideas, confirmed by the two World Wars and the nuclear age.

Conrad wants also to focus on discovery, not only in seeing new lands but also discovery of the self: it is like a journey towards new lands and towards himself.

The inner message of the novel seems to say that the environment man makes for himself is the direct result of his own inner state and the things that most dominate the individual- greed, indifference or compassion.

In this novel we can find also the theme of Darkness, that is not only a symbol, and wants to represent not only the jungle, but also the “darkness” in the “heart” of man, his evil, which is often a consequence of man’s greed for power and wealth.

At the end there is the theme of the double, represented by Kurtz and Marlow: they have some similarities and some differences: they both went to Congo, but Kurtz is a leader among the natives, he is a remarkable man. Kurtz dies, Marlow survives instead.

Symbols:

The novel is full of symbolism, much of which stems from the title itself, since the word “darkness” has different symbolic meanings in the novel; in fact it represents the darkness of the jungle, which is the innermost part of it, where the protagonist has to go to find Mr Kurtz, but also the darkness of humans heart and its evil, which derives from man’s avidity for power and wealth.

Conrads plays with the usual associations between colour “black and white”:

The white man exploited the African native to obtain the precious “white gold” (the ivory)

Those countries considered civilised, are “blackened” because of crimes of colonialism.

Images of death are numerous in the novel: the most grotesque being the macabre description of Kurtz’s hut, which is decorated outside with the black skulls of dead men on poles. The image of the jungle itself is also extremely powerful. Marlow is surrounded by its physical presence, like a rioting invasion of soundless life.

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Conrad's narrative technique in Heart of Darkness

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Conrad's narrative technique in Heart of Darkness

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Joseph Conrad in ''Heart of darkness'' uses a complex narrative technique, clearly under the influence of the medieval tale telling poets such as Chaucer and Boccaccio.
The first narrator does not involve himself in the events, but keeps himself at a distance so as to observe all the accounts of the characters and delivers it to us. He remains anonymous and starts narrating on board of the Nellie. The same Anonymous voice gives entry to the central issues that Marlow, the second narrator,is going to deal with in the rest of his narrative.
By using the 'frame' technique the author vehicles a message for the European reader, which is that  ideas about European imperialism are founded on a number of lies that he has wholeheartedly believed.
Conrad's reason for framing Marlow's narrative thus becomes apparent: The narrator's values and assumptions are challenged — although indirectly — by Marlow's story, and the reader is meant to perceive these two points-of-view as two different understandings of man's relationship to the natural world and the people in it.By the end of the novel, Marlow's tale significantly changes the narrator's attitude .
In addition, Conrad has used the ‘retrospective method’ to convey what he could not mediate upon at the time of the experience. In the course of the narrative, Marlow moves back and forth to introduce past in order to understand the present and the interrelationship of past and present.

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The film "Apocalypse Now" is not a film transposition  of the book "Heart of darkness", but there are many similarities between the two as the film was inspired by the book: the main plot is the same, as well as the first person narrator, and often the scenes are pretty much identical, as we can see with the scene "The Horror".

Sometimes the scenes or the characters are presented in the same way both in the film and in the book, even if it's clear that characters are described in a more complex way in the book.

It is important to remember that "Apocalypse Now" is just book-based, but with a completely different meaning. The main differences are that in the book there is a criticism towards colonialism, and on imperialism, while the film criticizes the stupidity of war. "Apocalypse Now" is, in fact,set during the Vietnamese War.

The protagonist, Marlow, remains similar to the book, but has a different name, Willard. Kurtz on the other hand, even if mantains the same name, is quite different, because in the film he is an ex-colonel which Willard has to kill, but he is not obsessed with ivory.

There are some differences also in the mission: while Marlow has just to see what is happening in the jungle, Willard must neutralise Kurtz because the American Forces discovered that something was wrong with him, as he didn't follow the orders.

There are some similarities in the narrative technique in the book and in the film, the very complex and descriptive language Conrad uses is rendered by Coppola with very cinematographic scenes and long sequence shot.

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Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: autobiographical elements  

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Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: autobiographical elements  

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Sons and lovers is an autobiographical novel in fact most of the facts narrated in the novel coincide with the life of Lawrence and almost all the characters created by Lawrence bear a remarkable resemblance to their originals: Paul Morel and Lawrence’s youth is similar. The first autobiographical element that we recognize is the setting, in fact the background of the novel is Nottinghamshire which is the same place where Lawrence was born. Paul Morel and Lawrence’s father belonged to the working class, in fact the novel is a portrait of the mining working class and this element make the story realistic. As in Sons and lovers, the parents of Lawrence never enjoyed a happy marriage and the unhappy married life of the parents had a psychological disturbing effect on him. Both Paul Morel, who is the protagonist of the story and Lawrence established a close relationship with their mother in fact they were too dependent and this will haunt them for the rest of their lives so that the over-possessiveness of the mother made the sons incapable of spending a normal life and to have a perfect relationship with other women. In the novel Mrs. Morel feels a strong love for her son in fact she tried to prevent Paul’s relationship with Miriam. Also Lawrence faced numerous difficulties with his relationship in fact it creates scandal because Frieda was a married woman and older than him. As a result, all their attempts to establish a normal relations with other women ended in desperate unsuccessful attempts. Instead they hated their fathers because they were both aggressive and drunk. Paul bears a very close and acute resemblance with his own creator; like Paul, Lawrence was also a weak and sickly boy and he was brought very close to his mother by a serious attack of pneumonia. Lawrence brings out his own fear, with which he was haunted, through Paul.

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Innovation and tradition in Lawrence’s novels

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Innovation and tradition in Lawrence’s novels

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Lawrence is one of the modern writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

They aimed to give a more complex vision of man in his world. So he thinks that the purpose of the novel is trying to represent the “ inner life”, an unexplored part of reality, of humanity, describing characters’ psychology through the technique of the uninterrupted flow of consciousness, the interior monologue. This is thank to the discoveries of Freud in psychoanalysis about at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

This is one of the innovative parts of his style, but it’s not the only one.

In fact he added new themes in the literature. He wanted to talk about the relationship between men and women, about instincts, sexuality and class differences , two enormous taboos until that time. He was banned because of his works, and he was accused of obscenity. He explored theme such as the “Oedipus complex”, theorised by Freud, inspired by the classical tragedies. Then the Social and Romantic Bondage in relationship, morbid relations between mother and son , between man and woman. Moreover he adds the contradictions of human nature,like in love and hate. And the social role of the woman, that was changing in that time, in fact he represents in “Sons and lovers”, two models of woman, the traditional one so the perfect angel, as Mrs. Morel, and the modern one, as Miriam and Clara.

He was revolutionary, he wanted to show a very hidden part of our human nature. On the other hand he remains linked to the tradition of the prose, mixing lyricism and naturalism. He has a sharp realism. His style changes from page to page, realistic in one and sensual,lyrical or symbolic in another. He was very skilled at describing setting in a lyrical way.

He wanted to criticize the mechanical and inhumane modern world, so it represents a place untouched by industry. And through these descriptions and narrations he wanted to delineate characters feelings and psychology. He shows the intensity and erotic sensuality, in fact he thinks that relationship, the strong power of love and emotions, are the unique remedy to his society.

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Sons & Lovers: analyse the characters & their relationships 

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Sons & Lovers: analyse the characters & their relationships 

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Sons and lovers is a study of human relationships.  In the novel it is possible to see reflected Lawrence's idea about relationships between men and women. He believed that in the modern age, the only relationship possible was one kept together by sex and a strong physical connection.  This is because the modern world was becoming inhumane and mechanical, there was not enough space for true feelings, instincts and passion.
This kind of relationship is reflected in the character of Paul who's in love with Miriam, exactly in this way.
She, on the contrary, loves him in a spiritual way, she doesn't care about carnal love.
When she finally decides to give herself to him, Paul breaks up with her because they don't have the same desire.
During the relationship with Miriam, Paul's mother is troubled as she thinks Miriam is going to absorb her son, she won't let him grow independent, "she will suck him up". Gertrude Morel is so in love with her son because she's deeply disappointed by her relationship with her husband.
The connection between Paul and his mother is so tight that he doesn't feel comfortable seeing Miriam, knowing his mother doesn't like her; this crazy shape sorter is defined as a perfect representation of "oedipal love".
After the breakup he will meet Clara, a married woman separated from his husband.
Once the husband comes back, Clara feels sorry for him and goes back to her relationship, leaving Paul alone, again.
Even after his mother's death he will not be able to go back to Miriam because the bond with her is too strong.

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One of the most important themes of this novel is  family: Lawrence analyses in particular the dynamics of the Morel family.
Then, there is the introduction of Freud’s Oedipus complex into the novel and the lack of awareness (the mother doesn’t know that she is destroying the lives of her sons). Another theme of the novel is the role of the Christianity in the lives of the characters; related to that, Lawrence introduces the theme of the physicality, a big problem for the sons during their lives because of the Christian beliefs.
An important theme is the women in the society: during the period in which the story is set, the rights for women and societal thoughts about women were gradually changing. Talking about the novel, Paul is not able to understand that the women in his life represent the failing changing; so the novel suggests that the social attitudes need to change so that the women can find fulfilment in life and equality in society and relationships.  In this novel Lawrence decided to deal the theme of death portrayed as a terrifying thing; the theme of the grief and the self destruction: the characters do something that is painful for themselves.
The last themes are nature and industrialism: he uses the natural world to represent the interior aspects of the lives of the characters of the novel. Their lives are changed not in positive by industrialism, they live a life with an unstable and unhappy state of mind.

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The Oedipus complex takes its name from the title of the Greek play “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles. In the story, Oedipus is prophesied to murder his father and have sexual intercourse with his mother. This complex became one of Sigmund Freud's most celebrated theories of sexuality, he argued that these repressed desires are present in most young boys. D.H. Lawrence was aware of Freud's theory, and in “Sons and Lovers” he uses the Oedipus complex as its base for exploring Paul's relationship with his mother. Paul is devoted to his mother, and that love often overflows in romantic desire.  Completing the complex, Paul hates his father and often fantasizes about his death.
Paul transfer these feelings elsewhere, and the receivers are Miriam and Clara. However, Paul cannot love either woman nearly as much as he loves his mother (he does not always realize that this is an burden to his romantic life).The older, independent Clara, especially, is a failed substitute for Paul. In this setup, Baxter Dawes can be seen as an imposing father figure; his savage beating of Paul can be viewed as Paul's desire for punishment for his guilt  Paul's impatience to befriend Dawes once he is ill reveals his guilt over the situation even more.
Mrs. Morel is involved with it as well. She desires both William and Paul in romantic ways, and she hates all their girlfriends. She projects her frustration with her marriage onto her love for her sons. At the end of the novel, Paul takes a major step in releasing himself from his Oedipus complex. He intentionally overdoses his dying mother with morphine, an act that reduces her suffering but also destroys the similarities with Oedipus , since he does not kill his father, but his mother.

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The role of nature, instincts, reason & industrialization in Lawrence’s novels

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The role of nature, instincts, reason & industrialization in Lawrence’s novels

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Lawrence was born in Eastwood, a small town in Nottinghamshire, the heart of the industries. He grew up in between his parents’ problems: he was deeply attached to his mother, who made every effort to remove her children from the same fate of his husband, a coal miner, with whom Lawrence never had a good relationship.

In this industrial context he developed his hostility towards the industries that had dehumanised his father.

In his main works we see the novelist dealing with themes such as human instinct, the dark forces of the inner self and the man’s attempt to conquer and control them.

He also focused on the opposition between reason and human instinct: in fact, he saw instinct as the only way to survive industrialisation.

Moreover, he was convinced that science and knowledge were not enough to enable man to grasp the true meaning of life and that instinct and intuition were more important than reason.

Lawrence shows his attraction to that places that are untouched by industries, and in fact he travelled a lot throughout Italy, Australia and Mexico (due to health problems); in his works, he uses nature and the natural world to represent the inner self of the characters. Nature is a source of beauty, inspiration, hope and human connection in the novel. The characters are at their best when they are in contact with nature: the harmony of nature brings harmony into their souls. The theme of nature is in opposition to that of industrialization and consumerism.

Lawrence deeply critizes modern society: his values are the countryside, nature and instincts, while he criticizes towns, civilisation and the intellect. So through “primitivism” he explains the importance of nature.

“Sons and Lovers”, a novel published in 1913, is set against the background of Nottinghamshire, with its mining villages and beautiful landscape, during the early years of the 20th century.  Lawrence described nature not as a simple part of scenery, but as an important connection with human lives. He tried to express the characters' psychological state in the relation between them and nature. “Spring was the worst time. He was changeable”, represents a “pathetic fallacy”, because nature reflects the feelings and moods of the character, Paul. It is a kind of personification that gives human traits and emotions to inanimate objects of nature. In this case spring affects Paul’s mood.

“Orion was for them chief in significance among the constellations. They had gazed at him in their strange, surcharged hours of feeling, until they seemed themselves to live in  every one of his stars. This evening Paul had been moody and perverse. Orion has seemed just an ordinary constellation to him.” Lawrence thought that the more you are close to nature, the more are you close to yourself and your instincts. It’s a romantic idea but, at the same time, it represents something modern. In fact, though the novel’s setting is an industrial landscape in a coal mining area, most of the love scenes take place outdoors, near lakes or rivers, or near forests. He chooses an industrial landscape because it contrasts the natural setting. Lawrence revolted against industrialization and machinery in his treatment of nature. Nature symbolizes the instinctive life, while machinery exercises a disruptive and dehumanizing influence on human beings.

Moreover in Lawrence’s works the description of nature is very realistic and lyrical. “One day in March he lay on the bank of Nethermere, with Miriam sitting beside him. It was a glistening, white-and-blue day. Big clouds, so brilliant, went by overhead, while shadows stole along on the water. The clear spaces in the sky were of clean, cold blue.”

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Modernism is a cultural movement that developed in the early 1900s.
It was born in a period of strong tension characterized in particular by the First World War where almost one million British soldiers died.   It was also an age characterized by some of the most important discoveries in history: in scientific field Albert Einstein demonstrates the theory of relativity, in the philosophical and theological field Friedrich Nietzsche questions everything that was given for sure, in the context of psychoanalysis Freud lays the foundations for the study of the unconscious.   As a result, people will have a more complex world view.   All this will give rise to a progressive change in artistic field.
Modernism required a new study of dynamism and doesn’t allow the traditional use of perspective.   It is divided into various minor currents: at the beginning it was divided into Futurism and Surrealism, later also in Cubism, Vorticism and Dadaism.

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The new philosophical and scientific theories that influenced Modernism.

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The new philosophical and scientific theories that influenced Modernism.

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Influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization, and especially the development of railways, starting in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture associated with this. These technological advances radically changed the urban environment of the 19th century and the daily life of people.

Two of the most significant thinkers of the mid-19th century were the biologist Charles Darwin with his “The Origin of Species” (1859) and the philosopher and economist Karl Marx with his “Il Capitale” (1867).

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness. In particular, the idea that human beings were guided by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved difficult to reconcile with the idea of a  spirituality.

Karl Marx supported that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system and that the workers were anything but free.

The theories of Sigmund Freud , central to Freud’s thought, were also influential at the beginning of modernism: the idea of "the primacy of the unconscious in mental life", which focuses subjective reality on the play of basic impulses and instincts, through which the external world was perceived. The description of subjective states implied an unconscious full of primary impulses, counterbalanced by self-imposed restrictions derived from social values. Friedrich Nietzsche  was another important precursor of modernism, with a philosophy in which the psychological drives, in particular the "will of power", was of fundamental importance.

Henri Bergson, emphasized the difference between scientific time, clock time and direct, subjective, human experience of time. His work on time and conscience "had a great influence on novelists of the twentieth century," especially those modernists who used the technique of flow of consciousness, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Just as important in Bergson’s philosophy was the idea of "élan vital", the life force, which "determines the creative evolution of everything." His philosophy also attached great value to intuition, without however rejecting the importance of intellect.

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James Joyce was born in Dublin into a very religious family, in fact he studied at Jesuit colleges. He graduated in modern languages ​​and his interest in European literatures led him to begin to think of himself as a European instead of an Irishman. He began to no longer tolerate the catholic religion and the provincial life of Dublin, for this he decided to travel, went into voluntary exile. Nevertheless he set all his works in the city of Dublin, because he wanted to give his home town literary importance. His effort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. By portraying these ordinary Dubliners he succeeded in representing the human mind and fused it with the reality of the world around him. The description of Dublin derived from the character's mind floating.

“Dubliners” is a collection of short stories about Dublin and Dublin’s life, the life of Dubliners leads them to a psychological paralysis, that is the consequence of a frenetic and impersonal city life; all the Dubliners are fearful people, they are slaves of their familiar,moral,cultural,religious and political life.

Also “The Dead” is set in Dublin, the title can be referred to the people present at the party or symbolize Irish people in general that are passive in front of oppression that there is in the world.

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Joyce's life was marked mainly by two cities: Dublin, the writer’s birthplace and Trieste, the city where he would settle for a few years of his life and where he would found a discreet serenity.

Joyce was born in Dublin but, after his graduation he went to Paris with the intention of studying medicine and supporting himself by teaching English, but after a few months he was called back to Dublin because his mother was dying and so he remained in Ireland for a year after his mother’s death .

In 1904 Joyce met the woman destined to become the reference point in his emotional life: Nora Barnacle. With Nora he left once again for the Continent, where he was to spend the rest of his life in voluntary and self- imposed exile as a wanderer in fact he travelled all around Europe: for this reason we can call him  European.

Though he left Dublin permanently, the emotional link with his native city was never over, in fact Joyce developed a love-hate relationship with Dublin, and it was Dublin that provided the central material of his work, “Dubliners”. After the attempt to find a job in Zurich and a brief period of teaching in Pola he went in Trieste and in Paris.

In Trieste he taught English at the Berlitz school and there he became a friend of Italo Svevo and they influenced  each other. In 1915 Joyce and Nora moved to Zurich, where their financial situation improved and by this time he had become known in literary circles and writers as Ezra Pound and Eliot supported him.

In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris because it was a cosmopolitan city in fact  was the meeting place for different people and cultures and it was considered as a crossroads of very different breeds, languages and traditions which, however, mix and coexist in one place.

It was in France where the first so-called "salons" took place,  meeting places where intellectuals from all over the world gathered to debate on  both political and cultural topics; for this reason, that was an opportunity for Joyce to expand his culture and make himself known.

In the last years of his life with the outset of the Second World War and the fall of France the Joyces moved from Paris to Zurich where they died.

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When James Joyce was 22, he left Dublin and he lived for some time in Paris and here, he met

his wife, Nora; so they went to Rome and Trieste where he made friends with Italo Svevo.

Here, in Trieste, he had so many financial problems that he started teaching English for a living

and Italo Svevo was one of his pupils. Having learned that there was a writer among his pupils,

Joyce asked Svevo to read his manuscripts. The writer from Trieste agreed and the Irishman's

reaction was of absolute enthusiasm: it is thanks to the Irish author that Svevo began to be known

and appreciated in Europe; in Italy, however, the author's themes were not  understood.

The fact that Svevo and Joyce got to know each other and confront their ideas doesn’t mean

that Svevo was the Italian Joyce, that is, Zeno's Conscience and Ulysses are nothing more than

two creations of the same literary technique. The two novels are profoundly different because the

techniques with which the consciences of Leopold Bloom and Zeno Cosini are outlined are

different.

What influenced the two authors was the psychoanalysis developed during modernism.

However Svevo believed that psychoanalysis did not have a resolutive aim but aimed at an internal

analysis that however did not lead to results: the opposite idea for Joyce

James Joyce resorts to the steam of consciousness, epiphany and paralysis:

-Stream of Consciousness: characters show their thoughts directly though interior monologue,

sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way.

-Epiphany: a special moment in which a normal action or a banal situation leads the character to a

sudden self realization about himself or about the reality surrounding himself.

-Paralysis: physical paralysis caused by external forces, moral paralysis linked to religion, politics and culture.

We find the interior monologue in both authors: the thoughts of the character develop, now in the third or the first person, in a way that would seem free and spontaneous, without logical links, but

it is clear that behind them there is the logical control of the author (who wants to bring his own

character to talk about some themes.

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Joyce's short stories were published in 1914 in a collection called Dubliners though all the

stories in the book were probably written before 1907 while the writer was living in Trieste.

The fifteen stories which compose the collection form a realistic and evocative portrait of the

lives of ordinary people in Dublin and all the events take place in Dublin which is not a simply

setting.

They are organized in four groups that correspond to the four phases of human life:

childhood,adolescence,maturity and public life (political, artistic and religious).

Joyce focuses on particular moments in the lives of his characters which lead to a moment

of self awareness generated by what he calls an " epiphany".

An epiphany is a sudden revelation, a moment in which a spiritual awakening is

experienced.

In fact most of the protagonists of the stories feel like blocked by a sense of paralysis which

prevents them from living a life of happiness and fullfilment.

Dublin itself becomes the centre of paralysis that is of a kind of stagnation due to the limited

cultural and social traditions of the country. The last story "The Dead" can be considered the

culmination of the feeling of paralysis which characterises the spiritual life of the city and

pervades the atmosphere of each story.

In this story Joyce displays acute psychological insight and ability to render human emotions

and relationships.

In this particular case both Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta experience the epiphany.

First it is Gretta who remembers her first love Michael Furey after listening to a song and

then Gabriel understands the least importance he has had in his wife's life if compared to the

tragic destiny of her girlish love affair.

Stylistically speaking the stories in Dubliners are written apparently in a traditional way.

However, the descriptive realism which permeates them already contains many of the

elements of Joyce's more experimental later work, such as the absence of a moralising

narrative voice, the description of the characters' inner thoughts and the use of symbolism.

In fact each story is told from the perspective of a particular character rather than through an

omniscient narrator.

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Dubliners is one of the main works by James Joyce; it’s a collection of 15 stories in which he describes the lives of different people living in Dublin.

Two main themes of this work are paralysis and epiphany: The first one is present in most of the stories, it represents a condition of the modern man, a consequence of an impersonal city life which affects many of them; the protagonists want to overcome this condition, but every time that they try, they fail because of the circumstances.

The second one is in a very rare situation, it describes a revelation of an emblematic truth that leads the characters to have a more profound understanding of themselves; nevertheless they continue to live their life as before.

In the story ‘the Dead’ the epiphany appears in both  protagonists: Gretta, Conroy’s wife, starts to cry after a party, when she hears a song that reminds her previous fiancé; so Gabriel asks her why she’s so sad and he says that his name was Furey and ‘he died for her’ (she loves Furey more than Conroy). After that Gabriel looks out to the window and realizes that his love for Gretta has been shallow and insignificant compared to Furey’s. So both of them realize that they live in a falsehood, their love is based on an illusion; Nevertheless they continue with their empty marriage.

This technique was already use in Italian literature by Svevo, revealing reality by an object or a daily event. Other artists use epiphanies, for example in ‘Sotto la Pioggia’ or ‘Punta del Mesto’. Also we find this in philosophy, in particular in Schopenhauer, who says that we live an illusion, a Maya’s veil that obscures  reality; so with a moment of epiphany we can rip this veil and begin to truly live.

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Dubliners: language & narrative technique

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Dubliners: language & narrative technique

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The Narrator is external but not omniscient, in fact the stories are told by the main character's point of view in every story. Also, we already have an idea of how the author approaches to narration: in fact the city is what connects all the characters together with experiences, creating an interconnetting web as in the plots sometimes a character mentions another one from another story. He also focuses on realism and mostly in “The Dead" on giving characters an intense psychological aspect. However he uses a lot of symbols like in “The Dead" where he uses the falling snow as a symbol of death. There’s also what makes his style so unique and innovative: the use of epiphany, the moment in which a character, through simple words or actions, reaches a moment of intense and complete awareness, a moment that will change their life completely.

As regards the language, Joyce tells stories which follow four different phases of life, childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life so it changes from one to one another suiting the characters and their lives. For example in the childhood phase, language will be easier and without difficult words or technicalities, that will be found in the public life phase instead, influenced by experiences but also jobs and social classes.

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The title can be interpreted in two ways. It can be refer to the people present at the party who come to symbolise Irish people in general; they are incapable of reacting aga the passive and oppressive atmosphere of the world in which they live, it is as though they are spiritually “dead”. The title can also refer to Michael Furey, Gretta’s tragic love and how those Who are dead can still have a great influence and effect on the living. In this story, just as in the other stories which make up the collection “Dubliners”, we can identify a specific moment of “epiphany”, the moment in which something life-changing is revealed to The main character. This happens to Gretta at The party and to Gabriel at the end of the story when he dwells on the true nature of the relationship between him and his wife Gretta. Through her revelation about Michael Furey he now reconsiders their love and also his own life in a different way. The final image of the falling snow can be seen as both a symbol of death and also as a kind of universal cleansing which brings a new consciousness and renewed life to Ireland.

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Ulysses by James Joyce is said to be the story of a day because there is no plot, the story

indeed revolves around one day and it is narrated through streams of consciousness by the

different characters.

We follow the characters as they live their rather normal life, we chase their thread of

thoughts.

The report of this ordinary life, this ordinary day is very detailed.

A little story of a day is also an expression that Joyce uses to describe his novel Ulysses

(besides a modern Odyssey, an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish), an epic of the body and a

book where each adventure creates its own technique).

The day at issue is June 16th 1904, which was also the day in which Joyce met his wife

Nora Barnacle.

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In a letter to his friend Carlo Linati, Joyce said that this novel can be considered as “a modern Odyssey”. The title first refers to Homer’s Odyssey and there is a correspondence between each chapter of Ulysses and the episodes of Odyssey. We can divide this novel into three parts: “Telemachy” (from chapter 1 to 3), where the protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, alter-ego of Joyce; “Odyssey” (from chapter 4 to 15), focused on Leopold Bloom, and, at the end, “Nostos” (meaning “homecoming” in Greek, from chapter 16 to 18) with Molly Bloom as a protagonist.

Even though we can link Ulysses to Odyssey, there are some important differences between them, such as the setting place and time and the characteristics of the protagonists. For example, on the one hand Odyssey is set in the Mediterranean Sea, on the other hand Ulysses is set in Dublin; in Odyssey the events take place in ten years, while in Ulysses they all happen on one single day. Also, Ulysses is a hero and Penelope is a faithful wife, on the contrary Leopold is an ordinary man and Molly is unfaithful, she doesn’t present a submissive role but is a modern woman who can freely express her thoughts.

The author wanted to show that the modern world is an immense panorama of futility and anarchy through the use of mythical method, in fact this novel is a parody of the myths and compares it to ordinary life and also opposes the mythical past to the chaos of the Modern Age. There is also a comparison between the theme of journey, which is characterized by movement in Odyssey and by paralysis in Ulysses.

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The expression “stream of consciousness” was first used by William James in “The Principles of Psychology” (1890). In this work he described the stream of consciousness as the continuous flow of thoughts and feelings. They fill the mind of the person who is remembering the past or forecasting the future. The thoughts can be both, positive or negative.

There is a real novelty in Ulysses: Joyce tried to take the interior monologue technique or the stream of consciousness to extremes by recording every single thought of the characters as they occur, in a realistic thought pattern linked by free association.

Interior monologue and stream of consciousness can be two different things even if most critics consider them as synonyms. While in the first the author focus only on necessary aspects of characters’ thoughts, in the stream of consciousness nothing is filtered. It isn’t presented in a linear or logical way but as the result of spontaneity. The reader has the important task of drawing information and conclusions. Indeed, it’s extremely difficult for any reader to fully understand, this is why just few writers tried to develop this technique.

One example of stream of consciousness can be seen in Molly’s soliloquy, a passage from the final part of the book. Molly Bloom is laying in bed and embarking on a series of reflections and memories. After her husband asked her to take him breakfast in bed, she starts thinking about Mrs Riordan, an old woman who her husband was interested in. Indeed he wanted to be named as an heir in her will. To enhance the dynamics of the stream of consciousness, Joyce uses lack of punctuation, puns, onomatopoeic words and a variety of different styles. There is a clear similarity between the Joycean and the Futurist way of writing.

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The evolution of Joyce’s style from Dubliners to Ulysses

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The evolution of Joyce’s style from Dubliners to Ulysses

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James Joyce is considered to be a perfect example of experimental writer, as his style
changed and transformed from realistic to overloaded, from the disciplined prose of
Dubliners, through an exploration of the character’s impressions and points of view and the
use of free indirect speech, to the extreme interior monologue.
Joyce asserted that he had deliberately used a "style of scrupulous meanness" in Dubliners.
Scrupulous means to have in mind what you believe to be right, exactness and precision.
So Joyce says that he wrote what he thought was right, precisely and exactly.
The term ‘meanness’ can indicate the lack of generosity. Joyce uses it to describe the
scarce number of words which he writes his stories with. From the minimum of words Joyce
succeeds to extract the maximum effect so that his style through realism can achieve
symbolism . Joyce uses his peculiar style to express his moral intent, but his stories are not
lectures or life lessons, just realistic narrations.
In Dubliners there are limited descriptions of the thoughts and emotions of the narrators,
that tend to disappear in the interior monologue. This allows the reader to learn about the
narrator directly from the text. The language of Dubliners is always adapted to the
characters’ age and social class, thus it usually appears simple and objective.
InUlysses, his style becomes less and less understandable, for the many different genres
and styles employed: from translated Latin to the gothic novel style, to the form of a musical
fugue in the "Sirens" episode.The cumulative effect of all these styles is to destabilize the
reader, and indeed, as the novel progresses, the shifts in style offer new perspectives on the
narrative and the characters.
Joyce uses various means to make his prose unique, the most important being the
stream of consciousness. It represents a character's thoughts and sense impressions in a
very precise way, sometimes without any punctuation, and by doing so it often shifts the
perspective from character to narrator. It is a fluid, flexible style that can incorporate trivial
and relevant thoughts and sensations freed from the necessity of narrative framework or
quotation marks.

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In “On writing: a memoir of the craft” Stephen King tells this anecdote about James Joyce: “One day, a friend went to visit Joyce and found him in a deep desperation while he was working. “James, what’s wrong?”, he asked. “Is it the job?”. Joyce nodded without looking at his friend. It was obviously the job… “How many words have you written today?”, his friend asked. And Joyce, still in despair, answered: “Seven”. “Seven? But James, that’s good, at least for you!”, his friend replied. “Yes”, James said finally looking at him, “I suppose it is, but I don’t know what order they go in!”

This anecdote shows the innovative features that Joyce introduced in English literature. Joyce is one of the most original writers of the 20th century. His experimentation with a prose style puts him at the forefront of modernist writing. All his works have the same themes, but they all look different because these themes are seen from different points of view and with a different language and style.

All the revolutionary elements that Joyce introduced in modernist novel are in Ulysses, a milestone of English literature.

Here, he abandoned the symbolic and realistic prose of Dubliners, his first novel, and he switched to the interior monologue technique. Reading Ulysses is very hard, because the narration follows the stream of consciousness of the characters based on free association; the reader can fully understand the nature of its characters because the story is a continuous flow of thoughts with no logic order, since they represent the confusion of people. This novel hasn’t got neither a conventional reported speech, nor a rigorous structure of the dialogues. Through this innovative technique, every thought of each character is written, and nothing is filtered. The stream of consciousness sounds more realistic in this work than in Dubliners because Joyce didn’t use punctuation, so reading the novel is like taking a picture of the characters’ mind.

Some parts of the novel are very difficult on a first reading, because each character jumps unexpectedly from past memories to future events. Joyce understood that reporting the interior feelings, sensations and reflections made his novel more relevant for the reader.

But Ulysses shows other innovations too: the action takes place on a single day, the three characters are the modern interpretation of the main characters of Odyssey, but unlike Homer’s poem, Ulysses hasn’t got a real plot, so the parody aspect is another type of experimentation. In Ulysses, Joyce uses the so called “mythical method” to show the gap between present and past, thus criticizing modern society.

The long interior monologue of Molly, one of the main characters, is the best example of extreme flow of thoughts. Here, Molly is lying in bed and she can’t sleep, so her mind races in a flow of thoughts. She starts thinking about the requests of her husband and, without following any logic order, her mind jumps from the present to reminiscences of the past. Joyce presents his characters’ mind and thoughts in a realistic way. In this monologue there’s a relevant parody of the Odyssey because Molly is the modern Penelope, but she is completely different from Homer’s mythical counterpart. Molly is a self-centered, dominant, unfaithful woman who plays a major role at the end of this novel with her voice. Unlike Penelope, Molly hasn’t got a submissive role; indeed, she becomes the main character at the end of the story, and with this monologue Joyce probably wanted to highlight the difference between himself and Homer.

The conclusion of Ulysses is a major example of the stream of consciousness. Joyce wrote words apparently in a confusing way, using this innovative technique to convey Molly’s thoughts, without punctuation and connectors. But this is definitely his intention, because the human mind lets its thoughts flow without any logic order.

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the most important female authors in the period of the  Victorian age. We could consider her as one of the first feminist in English literature.
Feminism is the belief in the principle that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men but there are also different types of feminism, such as the “cultural feminism”, the “libertarian Feminism”, the "Radical Feminism” and several more. What they all have in common is that they have the same origin which is to call attention to the problem of discrimination between men an women concerning different issues, social and private.

She was an author that from the very beginning, could not comprehend as to why men and women were treated so differently.
Woolf started putting feminism into her literary works:

1) To the Lighthouse shows a link between Victorian woman and independent one. It studies the responsibilities of females and  the transformation of modern ones. The major female characters portrayed in the story are Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsey. They represent different opinions regarding life.
Mrs. Ramsey practices traditional female responsibilities (meant to fulfill the desires of a man and been a good mother to the children, she existed only to complete the opposite gender). On the other hand, Lily is a modern and independent person. She rejects the old Victorian customs and values. The modern era sees Lily having her own freedom and right to succeed without the need of having men and children.

The intentions of the author, Virginia Woolf, are to show that a woman can be satisfied without a man. In the novel, Lily has all that she requires in life.
Ramsey and Lily perceive marriage in different ways. For Lily, marriage is not an important and wishes to save herself from it.
For Ramsey, it is inevitable and advices Lily to get married. She does not appreciate the painting made by Lily about negative thoughts in marriage.

2)Between the Act
The author noticed father-son fights for supreme power in the family based on patriarchal history. (Patriarchal theories also involves women been sexual objects to men). This is in contrast to modern will that incorporates matriarchal principles. In this principle, the female desires to rule her family by herself therefore does not see the need of submitting to a man.
This mostly happens in the current world. This inspires Woolf to write Between the Acts novel.
Woolf identifies feelings that support patriarchal communities through paying attention to loyalty, values and sexual fantasies which make females characters in the novel to be attracted to Giles Oliver. His wife, Isa hopes for a better tomorrow as she hopes for a change after World War 1 in order to be more idealistic with love ( portrays independence).

It is through struggles that Giles and Isa go through that they can be able to embrace love. Through such struggles Woolf shows "Modernism".
As much as Isa struggles with her marriage, she is still tied to Giles. She learns more about independency when she has already gotten into marriage. It takes a while before she realizes that she doesn't have to stick in a marriage where her husband is cheating on her.
The initial customs and traditions forced a woman to stay with his husband even if conflicts arise or when he is disrespectful.
Men are seen to struggle with the changes too. Isa perseveres in some way as she waits for the end of World War 1 in order for changes to occur including marriage laws.

Male characters do not have visions. This is contrast with To the Lighting where dominance is greatly seen. This is perhaps to indicate the advancements of life as time progresses. They lack power over female characters that are seen to having become enlightened. Lucy believes in independency since it makes one become satisfied with life without the need of other people.

She represents a woman that does not allow dominance by men. The author believes that through literature, she is capable to contradict with traditional literature works. She hopes of changing taboos regarding women’s roles towards men by describing them.

This would show that a man can see the significance of a woman. She has created a unique system which made people see life in a different way. The novel demonstrates the transformation as from Isa’s experiences in marriage up to Lucy’s need for a change hence the essence of this novel compared to her other works.

3)"A Room of one’s own”

‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own?’ [2]

With this sentence Virginia Woolf began her novel: this essay turns around many questions that Woolf ask directly to women’s soul.
The room that represents independence and individuality, is the key word to the ideal of emancipation for Woolf. It was an analysis to understand why women were human beings with lots of difficulties to evolve.
the goal of the book was to highlight the women condition of the Nineteenth century that is the restriction of the female to silence. If until the Nineteenth century women had to be without expressions, opinions, and education, Virginia Woolf wanted to push every woman to react.
the new motivation of Virginia Woolf, was that every women had to be independent. Independent to write a book, independent to do sport, independent to smoke and work like a men. These were things that in that century was forbidden also to think. The beautiful vision of women treated in the essay “A room of one’s own”, demonstrate how Virginia Woolf was modern and sensitive to the grow up of women’s rights.

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Virginia Woolf: depression in her life & in Mrs Dalloway 

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Virginia Woolf: depression in her life & in Mrs Dalloway 

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Virginia Woolf lived a very difficult life and so she had a lot of mental breakdowns. She was depressed. In fact, when she was only 13 years old her mother died. Then, also her sister Stella, her father and her brother Toby died. Another cause of her depression was the fact that she suffered sexual abuse by his brother George, that she called “my incestuous brother”. After a tormented life, she committed suicide at the age of 59. Her mental disorders influenced her works. In particular, we can see this fact in her book “Mrs Dalloway” in the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran who has mental disorders since he saw his best friend died in front of him. Septimus well represents the depression of Virginia Woolf and at the end of the story he will commit suicide.

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Memory and the past

Clarissa’s party stirs up memories for many of the characters, and memories are constantly woven into the present-day thoughts of the characters.

Warfare

An important point about this "war" novel is that no actual warfare takes place. All we see is the aftermath – the trauma and the shell-shock, the ripples of damage to those who survived.

Society and class

Post-World War I British society was very conservative and hierarchical (that means that social class was super important).

The characters in the upper class cherish their family history and often come from royalty or aristocracy; for those in the lower class, it is very difficult to move up in the world.

Time

One of the amazing things about Mrs Dalloway is the creative use of time. The novel starts in an early morning in June 1923 and ends the next day at 3am; that means fewer than twenty-four hours pass during the course of the story.

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Mrs Dalloway is one of the most important works of Virginia Woolf. She wrote it in 1925. It reflects a great deal about its time and its writer. The author wanted to express her point of view through the eyes of Peter Walsh, a veteran that doesn’t like the establishment, the empire and so the values of that time.

The plot isn’t complex, it treats the course of a day. But it is dotted with some facts, some minor as clarissa buying her own  flowers by herself, and some serious as the suicide of the veteran Septimus Smith.

The most important feature of that work is the narrative technique. Virginia Woolf was a genius, she has put together the time of consciousness, so the real time of the mind, with the ineluctable time of the clock. Her concept of time is well expressed by    one of her quotes :

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Virginia Woolf

The life of a human being hasn’t a schematic course, it is not “geometrically ordered”.

Mostly the mind is not logical in memories, we remind things through different senses,and in many ways. So it isn’t precise, there is like an aura that surrounds thoughts. But then the Time is ineluctable, it continue to flow,it cannot be stopped. In the novel it is the Big Ben strikes that reminds to the characters and to the readers  that Time is sovereign, and that they cannot escape it.

The author uses a revolutionary style ,that it’s spreading in this time, the stream of consciousness.

Because of that the author chose to narrate her story through the  feelings, perceptions, memories,and the thoughts of the characters, but in third person narrator .

In few lines we can notice different styles:  descriptions of what the character thinks, like a memory, just the line below presents what is happening, and then the descriptions of what the character sees, with his personal perceptions and thoughts. So that is a various style.

James Joyce used the same writing technique, but he shows the character’s thoughts directly through the interior monologue.There is not a linear or logical order.

Often the result is a spontaneous free associations of ideas,where the mind jumps from an argument to another, from a positive to a negative thought, from past to future without links and punctuation. This is the real point of difference between these two writers, and their narrative technique. James Joyce throws out ,from the pages of his novels,  the thoughts of his characters by the illogical but direct way of the interior monologue. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf wants to guide the reader in the middle of the real thoughts and feelings of the characters , through an omniscient narrator, that do not hide anything and it do not comment anything.

Moreover, also Lawrence used the stream of consciousness because he wants to show the most deep desires and impulses of the inner-self. His narrative style is more similar to Woolf’s, he uses punctuation, and the third person narrator.

We can compare this style to the French Naturalism. That is a literary movement of the 19th century that wanted to analyze the lower layer of society from an impersonal point of view. This narrative technique can be compared to the stream of consciousness because the purpose of  naturalism was to describe the reality objectively, showing it in a new way to denounce the social problems and injustices.

The stream of consciousness is created to describe the real inner-self of the modern man, the complexity of the mind and of the feeling of each human being.

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Mrs Dalloway: structure & narrative technique

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Mrs Dalloway: structure & narrative technique

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Mrs Dalloway is a Virginia Woolf maturity novel, so it has a much more complex structure than the previous ones.

It is considered an experimental novel, indeed it often confuses the reader.

The technique used is the “stream of consciousness”:

It is a narrative device useful to tell the free associations of ideas of the protagonist’s mind who is led to reconstruct the most significant events of her own existence.

Despite being so complex, it is very well structured.

It doesn’t tell a real story but it refers to the preparation of a party:

the events take place during a day in which a decisive event doesn’t happen.

This is perhaps the novel in which Woolf best expresses a concept of life as if it were a “multitude of things”, in this case the protagonist links the events narrated, the narrative "flights" and the other characters

All this wants to show that life is not linear but it is a luminous halo.

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MRS DALLOWAY: ANALYSIS OF THE CHARACTERS 

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MRS DALLOWAY: ANALYSIS OF THE CHARACTERS 

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Mrs. Dalloway is one of most important novels by Virginia Woolf. It is a moders novel because she wants to express the inner world of characters.

Clarissa Dalloway is the protagonist, the novel begins with Clarissa's point of view and follows her perspective more closely than that of any other characters. While Clarissa prepares for the party she will give that evening we are aware of her thoughts. Clarissa is vivacious and cares a great deal about what people think of her, but she is also self-reflective.She often questions life's true meaning, wondering if happiness is truly possible. She feels both a great joy and a great dread about her life. She nas a desire of privacy and in the same time she needs to communicate with others. Throughout the day Clarissa reflects on the summer when she chose to marry her husband Richard instead of her friend Peter Walsh. She is happy with Richard , but she is not entirely certain she made the right choice about Peter. This decision rejecting a life of originality and choosing one of stability and compromise.

Richard Dalloway is Clarissa's husband, a member of Parliament in the conservative government. He is a sportsman and he likes being in the countryside. He is a loving father and husband. While devoting to social reform, he appreciates English tradition. Richard and Clarissa Dalloway represent the establishment, Richard being a Member of Parliament and Clarissa being a a wealthy socialite , but there is much more to Clarissa than this.

Virginia Woolf was enormously affected by the First Wolrd War, this is expressed in the character of Septimus Warren Smith. He is a veteran suffering from post-traumatic shock, married to Lucrezia. Though he is insane, Septimus views English society in much the same way as Clarissa does, he shares so many things with Clarissa that he could be her double. Before the war he was a young, idealistic, aspiring poet. After the war he regards human nature as evil and believe he is guilty of not being able to feel. Than he succombs to the society and he commits suicide. Clarissa sees in his decision to take his own life a certain dignity and courage.

Peter Walsh is a close friend of Clarissa, once desperately in love with her. Clarissa rejected Peter's marriage proposal and he moved to India. India is important because V.Woolf did not believe in the establishment or in the supremacy of European colonialism and culture but she believes in the countries of the Empire which began to demand independence. Peter Walsh embodies this attitude, despite working in the Indian Service, he does not like the Empire and is sceptical of the values of the time.
Sally Seton is another close friend of Clarissa and Peter in their youth. Sally was a wild girl who smoked cigars. She and Clarissa were sexually attracted. Now Sally lives in Manchester and her married name is Lady Rosseter. These are the most important characters but we have also Lucrezia Smith, who is Semptimus's wife, Hugh Whitbread merried to Evelyn Whitbread, the doughter on Clarissa and Richard, Elizabeth, Doris Kilman, Sir William Bradshaw, Dr.Holmes, Lady Bruton, Miss Helena Parry, Jim Hutton, Daisy Simmons, Evans, Mrs. Filmer and Ellie Henderson.

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Contrasts & similarities between Joyce & Woolf  as for language & style

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Contrasts & similarities between Joyce & Woolf  as for language & style

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Language

The most particular aspects of James Joyce’s language can be seen in his “Ulysses”. In this novel, which is the one that made him one of the most original and innovative writers of 20th century, he attempts to take the interior  monologue technique to the extremes by recording every single of the characters. The result of this technique is the absence of any conventional use of dialogue and description and the complete absence of punctuation, pronoun references etc.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have a lot in common from the style point of view. Although, Virginia Woolf is much clearer from the language view point: she expresses coherent and logical thought patterns, mostly by always using conventional grammar and punctuation.

Style

James Joyce uses an external narrator, but the stories are told from the point of view of the main character.

Then, he has two main themes: paralysis and epiphany.

Paralysis can be described as the consequence of a frenetic and impersonal city life which affects many of us and may have different sources.

Epiphany describes a sudden revelation in the everyday life of the characters, of an emblematic truth or reality. It results in the characters having a more profound understanding of themselves.

In Ulysses, all the action takes place on one single day. In this novel, one of the most important Joyce’s goals is the Stream of Consciousness. This expression is used to describe the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and perceptions that fill the mind of a person during the waking moments.

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have got some similarities: for examples, in Mrs Dalloway she organizes the plot in one single day; then, they have in common the use of Stream of consciousness, that Woolf uses in a more rational way.

Also their narrators are similar, nevertheless Woolf’s one is omniscient and lets the reader interpret what he/she reads.

Virginia Woolf even uses a complex analysis of her characters, flashbacks and big variety of view points.

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Ulysses by Joyce & Mrs Dalloway by Woolf: comparison as far as the setting is concerned (time & place)

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Ulysses by Joyce & Mrs Dalloway by Woolf: comparison as far as the setting is concerned (time & place)

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Throughout the study of Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Joyce’s “Ulysses” we can see how
there has been an influence on Virginia Woolf’s style and setting. Both the novels are set in
a single day and they cover normal events from a routine. Although Clarissa Dalloway has
just turned fifty-two, her mind keeps returning to the past, to another June day in 1889 when
she was eighteen, and involved in an adolescent romance with Peter Walsh. She is
obsessed with these memories. The novel enters the consciousness of the characters it
takes as its subjects, creating a potent and psychologically impactful narrative.
Like Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus Ulysses, this novel too resides mainly in the
consciousness of two individuals, Mrs. Dalloway herself and Septimus Smith but also darts
in and out of the consciousness of several other characters.
However, there are also some important differences: Clocks and time take on a life of their
own in the novel, and their way of marking time stands in contrast to the characters’
experiences of time, particularly in its relation to memory. This significant aspect is totally
missing in Joyce’s novel.
Leopold Bloom's daily facts are placed against the background of a Dublin in relation to
which they remain fundamentally alien: they have no past and no future, no time to them;
they exist in a discontinuous, present. They search for a historical consciousness that give
them a meaning. This makes narratives capable to relate at a universal public, since it
explores human condition.
So we could say, Virginia Woolf’s novel is more into a real time, with a real past and present,
with vivid memories and hopes; in Joyce’s novel, instead, we lose the meaning of time as
everything is unclear, lost and complex.

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Animal Farm: a satirical allegorical fable

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Animal Farm: a satirical allegorical fable

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“Animal Farm” is a 1945 novel written and published by the English novelist and
journalist George Orwell, real name Eric Arthur Blair. It is considered to be one of
the most famous masterpieces of modern literature. The work was redacted during
the Second World War and its a biting satirical political allegory of the Russian
Revolution of 1917. The protagonist are a group of animals who live in a farm.
Orwell substituted people with animals in order to simply the situation and better
explain it, but also to avoid censure. The main characters are three pigs: Napoleon,
Snowball and Squealer. In general each animal represents a real life historical
character. The events of the novel follow the rise and fall of the actual Russian
Revolution, describing in detail Napoleon’s, Stalin’s, betrayal and subsequent
establishment of a dictatorship.

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ANIMAL FARM: AN ALLEGORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

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ANIMAL FARM: AN ALLEGORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

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In Animal Farm the protagonists are the animals where every event, every character is a metaphor of a reality: in fact through the satirical register, Orwell offers an overview of what  the utopian ideals of the Russian devolution were, based on Marxism and therefore on a dream of equality;and all revolutions if they become a regime are eventually betrayed. Being an allegorical novel, each character of Animal Farm represents a historical character of the Soviet Union:

Mr Jones = owner of the farm who mistreats animals, always drunk. It represents Tsar Nicholas II and the old order the animals want to rebel against.

Old Major = is the oldest pig on the farm, tells the other animals on the farm of a dream in which all animals were free from the control of humans, so you can decide for yourself. He also teaches a revolutionary song to his friends.Unfortunately, however, three days after his speech he died. He would represent Lenin, who would never see the progress of the Revolution.

Snowball = is one of the three young pigs that lead the revolt, along with Napoleon and Clarinet. After the revolt is driven out by Napoleon. It represents Trotsky, who was ousted by Stalin.

Napoleon = is the other pig that leads the revolt. Despotic and violent, he will expel Snowball, securing power with the use of propaganda and using purges. He represents Stalin.

Clarinet = is the propagandist of Napoleon. It represents Pravda.

Boxer = is the horse from work". It represents Aleksej Stachanov, the model of Russian worker sponsored by the Stalinist regime .

Benjamin = it is the cynical donkey who is skeptical about animalism. It represents the cynics who have resigned.

Bertha = is the mare and the most maternal figure of the farm. It represents ordinary people.

Mollie = is a young white very vain mare and she is not interested in revolution. She represents the Russian aristocracy.

Moses = is the raven that tells animals about eternal life after death. He represents the Russian Orthodox Church.

The hens = the hens refuse to give eggs to Napoleon; for this reason, the leader decides to suspend their food ration. When 9 chickens die, the others give eggs. It represents the killing of the Ukrainian Kulaki who opposed collectivization.

Dogs and sheep = represent the political police and the easily manipulated mass respectively.

Animalism = is the philosophical theory behind the revolution, it represents the communist principles postulated by Karl Marx.

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Theme of corruption

The Animal Farm depicts an ongoing revolution. Like all popular revolutions, the uprising on the animal farm develops from the hope of a better future, in which farm animals can enjoy the fruits of their labor without the rules of human. At the time of revolution, all the animal in Mr. Jones farm are committed to the idea of universal equality, but this ideals which fueled the revolution in the first place gradually leave space for the individual and personal interests. The animal farm illustrates how a revolution can be corrupted in a totalitarian regime through slow and gradual changes. In the beginning, the revolution creates the feeling that there may be a bright future in store for animal farm. The Old Major makes a series of objectively true points in his speech to animals, such as the fact that Mr. Jones is a cruel and insensitive teacher who cares little or not at all about their well-being and that humans themselves produce nothing (like eggs or milk). The Seven Commandments that Snowball and Napoleon devise in the following months are equally idealistic and, in theory, lay the groundwork for a revolution that will truly lift individual workers above horrible totalitarian leaders like Mr. Jones. In fact, when the revolution occurs, things initially seem to go in a positive direction for all: there are debates between animals, animals have the ability to propose elements for discussion and each animal participate in the work of the farm. Above all, the animals attract the best and fastest hay crop the farm has ever seen, suggesting that their revolution has benefits in addition to freeing them from a cruel situation under Mr. Jones. It seems possible that they will indeed be able to make self-government work. However, the novel also offers the first clues that corruption begins to take hold in the Animal Farm long before Napoleon takes drastic steps to turn it into a totalitarian state, even when, according to most of the text, thing seem to be going for the towards right and correct. For example, it isn't coincidence that only pigs and dogs are the ones who become fully literate. The only literate creatures are those who ultimately take control. In addition, Snowball also tries to convince the other animals that, since educated pigs are “mind workers” committed to understanding exactly how to manage the farm, they need the entire apple crop and all the milk from the cows. This shift in power takes place during the first harvest of hay, making it clear that things are not as rosy as hay yield and high productivity could make you believe. Corruption doesn't end with the theft of milk and apple; by the end of the novel, pig sleep on the farm, have a school for their children, drink alcohol and consume sugar, all initially prohibited in the original Seven Commandments. However, one of the most corrupt thing pigs do is modify the Seven Commandments to effectively legalize whatever they choose to do, from drinling alcohol to sleeping in beds. The corruption is something most animals don't notice, while those who do are forced to pretend not to notice. This combination of fear and unconditional trust in leaders is one of the most important elements that allow corruption to thrive. Although the rebellion of animals began as a revolution against humans and all they represent in the eyes of animals (greed, alcoholism, decadence and cruelty), the novel ends when the animals, led by Clover, cannot tell Napoleon that the human farmers came for a tour and a dinner. With this, the novel proposes that the revolution is something cyclical, which repeats itself over time. Because of corruption, those individuals who are powerful to begin with or who overthrow cruel and heartless leaders will inevitably end up looking like those former leaders once they understand what it is like to occupy such a position of power. In this sense, Orwell paints a dark vision of the revolution as a whole, since Animal Farm clearly demonstrates that even when the ideals of a revolution can be good, it's all too easy to distort those ideals, fall prey to corruption, damaging countless impotent individuals.

Theme of exploitation

In addition to being an allegory of the ways humans exploits and oppresses one another, the Animal Farm also makes a more literal discussion: humans exploit and oppress animals. While the animal rebellion is mostly comic in tone, it ends on a serious and poignant note when the animals "wipe out the last traces of Jones's hated reign. The harness-room at the end of the stables was broken open; the bits, the nose-rings, the dog-chains, the cruel knives with which Mr. Jones had been used to castrate the pigs and lambs, were all flung down the well". The novel also suggests that there is a real, as well as allegorical, link between the exploitation of animals and the exploitation of human workers. Mr. Pilkington jokes with Napoleon: "If you have your lower animals to contend with [...] we have our lower classes!". From the point of view of the ruling class, animals and workers are the same.

Theme of deception

To maintain their position of power over other animals, Napoleon and the other pigs create elaborate lies to cover up their actions. Squealer uses propaganda to convince animals that they are doing well when, in fact, their lives get worse over the months and years. Pigs secretly change the Seven Commandments and other resolutions of the rebellion, convincing the animals that their memories are flawed. The use of Snowball as a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong hides the fact that others are really responsible.

Violence and terror

In Animal Farm, Orwell criticizes the way dictators use violence and terror to scare their populations into submission. Violence is one of the yokes that animals want to get rid of when preparing for the Rebellion. Jones not only overloads animals and steals the products of their labor, but can whip them or massacre them at his discretion. Once pigs gain control of animals, like Jones they discover how useful violence and terror can be. They use this knowledge to their advantage. The prime example of violence and terror in the novel is the public executions model. The executions can be said to represent both the Red Terror and the Great Purge, but they stand out more generally for the abuse of power. The executions perhaps best symbolize the Moscow trials, which were evidence of trials that Stalin organized to instill fear in the Soviet people. To the witnesses of the time, the confessions of the accused traitors seemed to be freely given. In fact, they were forced. Napoleon probably imposes confessions from many of the animals he performs. Orwell's use of the allegory genre served him well in the execution scene. Execution with weapons is a violent and horrible act, but many people have become desensitized to it. The allegorical executioners of Orwell, the dogs who kill cruelly, interpret the bloody and inevitably animalistic side of the execution. Terror also comes in threats and propaganda. Whenever animals question an aspect of Napoleon's regime, Squealer threatens them with Jones' return. This is doubly threatening to animals because it would mean another battle which, if lost, would result in a return to their previous submissive lifestyle. The other main example of fear tactics in the novel is the threat of Snowball and his collaborators. Napoleon is able to defame Snowball in the absence of Snowball and to make the animals believe that his return, like that of Jones, is imminent. Snowball is a worse threat than Jones, because Jones is at least safe outside the animal farm. In modern language, Snowball is considered the terrorist responsible for the violations of the rights and freedoms instigated by pigs.

Theme of apathy and acceptance

At the beginning of the animal farm, the idea of ​freedom awakens animals as if from a long sleep. Immediately after the major's death, the animals begin to prepare for the Rebellion; just the idea of ​​revolution is enough to motivate them, since they don't expect it to happen during their lifetime. At the end of the book, animals became apathetic as Benjamin has always been. Despite the many difficulties and injustices they face, the pride of animals and Napoleon's propaganda keep them invested in the "superior good" and in the illusion of freedom. If Benjamin is the harbinger of apathy, Boxer is his antithesis. Strong not only in body but also in spirit, Boxer will make any sacrifice for the benefit of the animal farm. With the eventual betrayal of Boxer by the leaders he served unconditionally, Orwell lays bare another type of apathy: theirs. Far from truly considering Boxer a faithful companion, pigs treat him apathetically as if he were a simple object. Boxer's enthusiasm does not give him an advantage, but the eventual apathy of the other animals offers them a defense mechanism against the painful reality of their life. It is no coincidence that the most apathetic and cynical animal of the animal farm, Benjamin, is one of those that survives the longest. Benjamin's emotional detachment from situations, be they good or bad, prevents him from being disappointed. In his apathy and cynicism, Benjamin represents the "dark" Russian stereotype and Orwell himself perpetually pessimistic.

Theme of idealism

The animals embrace the ideals of Animalism and the equality and sharing this political philosophy promises them. They believe in the best intentions of one another, even as the practice of Animalism moves away from its noble concept of free, equal animals working together and sharing the plentiful fruits of their labor. Throughout the story the animals remind themselves of the beliefs that guided their revolution by singing "Beasts of England," which describes their ideal world.

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Winston Smith is the protagonist of 1984, he could be considered an anti-hero because he has qualities that are contrary to a hero's qualities. Orwell does not mention any circumstances regarding Wiston's birth, so no one can assume he was born like everyone else in society. He is also weak, old and coward and he just tries to scrape by in life. Later in the novel, he becomes more rebellious but he is still living for his own pleasure, he does not save anyone. The most heroic thing that he does is attempting to join the Brotherhood and bring down the Party.

So Wiston definitely doesn’t have anything typical of a hero apart for his name that reminds us of Churchill.

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In the society of Nineteen Eighty-Four every form of propaganda is used to control all aspects, even the most intimate, of an individual’s life. The governament wants to avoid any form of relationship because it’s afraid of the exchange of ideas, so people are always controlled.                                                                                                                                    Big Brother is the tyrant and he is always right. Under the rule of Big Brother the individual is not allowed to behave or think. Big Brother watches people in every corner of the city: there are posters with his face and under his face there’s the caption “Big Brother is watching you”.                                                                                                                                                         There are cameras, microphones and telescreens everywhere and the Thought Police has the duty of eliminate those who diverge from the party.                                                                                                                     An important instrument of control it is in fact the “Hate Week”, a week against the enemy  that unifies the population against a scapegoat.                                                                                                                          We can see another method of control in the job of Winston: “Winston works for the “Ministry of truth”and his job is to rectify newspapers and articles so that Big Brother is always right. Winston in fact changes the articles, the news so that Big Brother is always right. For example each week they had 30 gr. of chocolate, but Winston changes the news that chocolate changes from 25 gr. to 28, with 3 more grams of chocolate. In this way everyone is happy: people don’t have memory, and they have been deceived.                                                                                                                                                                                                       A very important instrument of control is also  newspeak: some members of the party are working on the language to simplify and eliminate all synonyms and antonyms. The aim is to limit every citizen’s language by taking away their ability to think and express themselves in a personal way. Newspeak is advertised as the perfect language in “Nineteen Eight-Four”, a language that will make human “consciousness always a little smaller”.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       An important idea of this new society is what is called Doublethink. Doublethink is the capacity to have two contradictory believes in the mind at the same time. It is essential to the party because by using it people can no longer recognise contradictions and simply accept every idea presented and consequently everything the Party states, including a revision of past policies and any other “truths”.

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The evolution of Orwell’s thought & perspective from Animal Farm to 1984

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The evolution of Orwell’s thought & perspective from Animal Farm to 1984

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If we think about Orwell’s thought, we can’t help but think about 1984 , his most famous book.

It is not uncommon to focus on 1984 : in this book we can clearly see Orwell’s ideas on

totalitarianism.

He was absolutely critical of all totalitarisms, and this can be seen even in his early works.

In Animal Farm, for example, we can see the critical way he depicted the communist regime.

Orwell describes the evolution of politicians and their attitude towards success and power:

the only way for this regime to work is with devoted inhabitants who never question their

superiors. Likewise, the goal of the leader is to disorient people (or in this case, animals),

creating incontrovertible sentences, such as “all animals are equal”, and changing those

slightly, as time passes by.

Those changes discombobulate people, here depicted as animals, and allow leaders to do

whatever they want, even collaborating with humans — their biggest enemies.

Notwithstanding the use of the language and the importance of sentences, the most

important thing in comparison with 1984 is the actual period of the revolution. These two

books can be seen as connected: not only because the importance of language and

sentences in 1984 is in some ways the evolution of the sentences used in Animal Farm , with

oxymores and confusing ideas, but also because Animal Farm deals with the start of the

revolution, featuring the pain and the profound contradictions behind it.

On the other hand, in 1984 the revolution is clearly finished, and Orwell focuses on the effect

of the revolution on individuals. While in Animal Farm the animals are somehow involved in

the revolution and feel the importance of it, in 1984 people are not aware of how Oceania

was before , knowing only the present situation (which is filtered by the Minister of Truth.)

The revolution slowly became a reality, and transformed itself into a totalitarian institution.

This can be seen many times during the book: for instance, the political party often

organizes obligatory celebration for different situations, but most of the time inhabitants don’t

know what they are cheering for — they are forced to. This can be seen as a common

element even of current totalitarian States (e.g., Russia or North Korea.)

Provided that, we can understand why Orwell focused so much on language and political

propaganda, especially in 1984 . Language forges the human brain: humans think through

words, so if a political party has the ability to control the way people speak, they will have the

power to control the way people think.

This can be seen very clearly in 1984 . In Oceania a whole Minister — the Minister of Truth

— is dedicated to propaganda and language manipulation. However, one of the Minister of

Truth’s jobs is to impose a new language, called Newspeak, in order to control how people

think and communicate.

Orwell wrote these two books at different times, but they have the same key idea: we have

to keep our eyes wide open. Dictatorships are subtle: are we really sure that we are free? Is

our own language corrupted?

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Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in New Jersey. His mother, who immigrated from Russia,
was a politically militant and suffered from a mental illness, while his father instead was a
poet and teacher. As a child he lived in a poor jewish neighbourhood. During his pre-teen
years he became fond of Walt Whitman, who will have a big influence on Ginsberg's works.
He attended the Columbia University , where he met Jack Kerouac and William S.
Burroughs. The trio will create an innovative,brand-new movement,the Beat movement.He
started writing during the mid-1940s while discovering his attraction to men.Ginsberg was
involved in a robbery as an accomplice. He pleaded insanity to avoid jail, attending the
university's health facilities. In 1954 moved to San Francisco and met the poet and model
Peter Orlovsky,one of his partners. One year later he read at a gallery extracts from his
poem "Howl", that became the manifesto of this new generation.In 1956 he publishes it in
the poetry collection "Howl and other poems" . The collection was censored for obscenity
and he was taken to court for this poem. Some literature experts were called to discuss the
book: they recognised that it threw sgade at numerous ideological issues of the american
society, which was unecceptable. But the judge affirmed that americans had both word and
expression right , in addition it couldn't be considered obscene if it had a social
importance.The same year his mother died, 2 days after a lobotomy. In the following years
he was prolific in his writings and worked also with music forms as well. Ginsberg travelled
the word exploring Europe, Asia and Latin America, and fell in love with indian culture,
becoming buddhist. He strained the phrase "Flower Power", the motto of pacifism, specificallyagainst the Vietnam war. Another important fact of his life is that he was an advocate of drug
use. Ginsberg died for liver cancer on April 1997, surrounded by friends.
Beat movement
With the phrase "beat movement", or "beat generation" we refer to the social and literary
movement that spread in the 1950s in America. The members were united by sense of
alienation from conventional , specifically from the consumerist american society. This belief
implies pacifism, gay rights, rejection of materialism and economic conflict between human
beings and escapism through drug abuse.The word "Beat" can be interpreted in several
ways: as the abbreviation of beatitude, referred to both the use of drugs and buddhist beliefs, or as the verb, so "defeated"by society ; as referred to the rythm of music too.The founder
and most important member , who made these ideas fully part of his life, in Allen Ginsberg.

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Samuel Beckett & the theatre of the absurd

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Samuel Beckett & the theatre of the absurd

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Nadine Gordimer was born in South Africa from a white, middle class family; she
saw with her eyes the South African policy of segregation against black people
since she was born and she was politically and socially committed during her
whole life to fight against the system and used her books as weapons.
This kind of racial segregation, called Apartheid which means distancing in
afrikaans language, existed the South Africa until 1994. Until then the country was
ruled by the white minority and the government provided different kind of services,
such as education, health care and mains of transport, between white skinned
citizens and black ones; usually the black people’s facilities were less provided
than the European’s one.
The Apartheid ended when Nelson Mandela was elected as president of South
Africa, which could be possible because in 1994 were held multi-racial election,
and he became the first black person to hold the position of president.
Nadine Gordimer began her strong opposition to apartheid at a really young age
and for many reason, in part her interest in racial and economical inequality were
shaped by her progressive parents, but mostly because her reading habit led her
to discover what was like to live as one of her black fellow citizens.
As soon as Gordimer started her activism, she became interested into Nelson
Mandela’s trial and soon became friend with Mandela’s defense during the trial,
Brian Fisher, an Afrikaner lawyer and a Communist.
She also achieved to sneak a copy of one of her books in Mandela’s cell, in facts
her works were submitted to a strong censorship, but she kept writing and
behaving as though as it did not exist.
The whole literary production of Nadine Gordimer, very diversified, as it
comprehends novels, short stories and essays, has as the main themes the
political, racial and social struggles that the black people had to suffer during the
apartheid, usually seen from the point of view of a white middle class person, just
like her.
Her commitment in these social themes was rewarded with many important
political and literary recognitions, such as the Nobel prize for literature in 1991 and
the French Legion of Honor in 2007.

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Atonement by Mc Ewan: themes & narrative technique

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Atonement by Mc Ewan: themes & narrative technique

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Atonement is considered one of Mc Ewan’s best works and was first published in 2001, when it
was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize.
The narrator in omniscient and in third person, so it could be thought that this is an objective
narration, but it isn’t, because the plot evolves from several points of view, not just from Briony’s
one or main characters’ ones; in addition these changes of points of view are done in a very quick
and unexpected way, the narrator switches from one character’s point of view to another’s.
Moreover there is a great interaction with the reader, who becomes the character’s mind and
eyes. Farther a great alternation between short sentences and long descriptions and digressions
is very remarkable; some of these digressions are the many flashbacks of the plot; in the plot
there are also two twists: one between the first and the second part ( in fact the first is about the
several actions that happen in the setting of the villa, while the second is about Robbie in prison
and his re-meeting with Cecilia), and the other one between the second and the third part ( in
which there is the last part of the story, that ends with Briony’s confession). Besides there are
many references to other genres, for example music, poetry, metrics, psychology, art, philosophy,
anatomy, and also to other authors, as Keats, Jane Austen, Dickens and Conrad, with the addition
of also horror elements.
As we can think from the title, the principal theme of this work is that of expiation, that is what
Briony tries to gain after ruining the relationship between her sister and her boyfriend through her
work as a nurse and through her novel, in which she tries to give them a new, although fictitious,
life. The themes of guilt, regret and memory are obviously correlated to this one, but also that of
imagination: in fact the author wants to transmit the fact that the power of imagination could have
positive but also negative consequences; with her imagination Briony is able to write her novel,
but with the same imagination she creates a false reality with terrible consequences (she believes
that she has seen Robbie raping her cousin, also after reading the letter that he has written to her
sister); also the theme of the importance and power of words is very remarkable, because if
Briony hadn’t said anything, she wouldn’t have caused the end of the relationship between Cecilia
and Robbie. Thus another theme is that of worth of time, that can change people, but not what
they have done. The last two, but not less important, themes are that of death and war; this is
described with all its horrors and represented as something monstrous and inhuman, that brings
nothing more than death and ruin.

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness 

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness 

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness

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“His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. ..

“One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed. “Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated.

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness

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“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
The horror! The horror!”

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness

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Text analysis : Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness

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This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man.

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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"I think he died for me," she answered.

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again, for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning.

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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"It was in the winter," she said, "about the beginning of the winter when I was going to leave my grandmother's and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn't be let out, and his people in Oughterard were written to. He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly."

She paused for a moment and sighed.

"Poor fellow," she said. "He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey."

"Well; and then?" asked Gabriel.

"And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn't be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer, and hoping he would be better then."

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:

"Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother's house in Nuns' Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn't see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering."

"And did you not tell him to go back?" asked Gabriel.

"I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree."

"And did he go home?" asked Gabriel.

"Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!"

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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She was fast asleep.

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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Text analysis : James Joyce The Dead    

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A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

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Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help

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Text analysis :   Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway   

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Text analysis :   Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway   

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Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

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Text analysis :   Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway   

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Text analysis :   Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway   

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What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?” – was that it? – “I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.

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Text analysis :   Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway   

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Text analysis :   Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway   

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She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty, — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There!” Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; the the hour, irrevocable.

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers - part 1    

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers - part 1    

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“She exults--she exults as she carries him off from me,” Mrs. Morel cried in her heart when Paul had gone. “She’s not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet--she will suck him up.” So the mother sat, and battled and brooded bitterly.

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers - part 2-3    

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers - part 2-3    

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And he, coming home from his walks with Miriam, was wild with torture. He walked biting his lips and with clenched fists, going at a great rate. Then, brought up against a stile, he stood for some minutes, and did not move. There was a great hollow of darkness fronting him, and on the black upslopes patches of tiny lights, and in the lowest trough of the night, a flare of the pit. It was all weird and dreadful. Why was he torn so, almost bewildered, and unable to move? Why did his mother sit at home and suffer? He knew she suffered badly. But why should she? And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her. Why did she make him feel as if he were uncertain of himself, insecure, an indefinite thing, as if he had not sufficient sheathing to prevent the night and the space breaking into him? How he hated her! And then, what a rush of tenderness and humility!

Suddenly he plunged on again, running home. His mother saw on him the marks of some agony, and she said nothing. But he had to make her talk to him. Then she was angry with him for going so far with Miriam.

“Why don’t you like her, mother?” he cried in despair.

“I don’t know, my boy,” she replied piteously. “I’m sure I’ve tried to like her. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t--I can’t!”This is  one of the most emblematic scenes of the novel "Sons and lovers”.

After taking a stroll with Miriam, Paul realizes that he loves her.

But  at the same time, he is pervaded by confusion, terror and dark feelings, therefore he assumes a nervous and strange attitude. This is due to the fact that his mother Clara disapproves of their relationship.

Clara indeed  is devoted to carnal passions whereas Miriam is a “spiritual” woman, she is smart and she calms every instinct with reason.

Paul knows that his mother suffers from their relationship, so he realizes both he loves  Miriam, but also hates her at the same time. No woman for Paul can be compared with his mother.

With this text Lawrence wants to demonstrate that instincts are superior to reason. Furthermore, the theme of Oedipal love is clearly addressed: on the basis of Freud's studies the author gives the protagonist the characteristic of deeply loving the mother and of hating the father.

Other issues addressed within the novel are "the relationship between man and nature" and” progress” which is viewed negatively.

LINKS

The Oedipus complex

-Italian literature: Pascoli

-Latin: Oedipus di Seneca

-Greek: Trilogia di Edipo di Sofocle

-Philosophy: Freud

The dualism “instinct” and “reason”

-Italian literature: Positivismo

-Latin: Argonautiche di Apollonio Rodio (Medea)

-Greek: Euripide

-Philosophy: Nascita della tragedia di Nietzsche

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers    

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers    

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers  

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Text analysis :     D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers  

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There was to be a little party at his house the next day, at which she was to attend.

“I shan’t come and meet you,” he said.

“Oh, very well; it’s not very nice out,” she replied slowly.

“It’s not that—only they don’t like me to. They say I care more for you than for them. And you understand, don’t you? You know it’s only friendship.”

Miriam was astonished and hurt for him. It had cost him an effort. She left him, wanting to spare him any further humiliation. A fine rain blew in her face as she walked along the road. She was hurt deep down; and she despised him for being blown about by any wind of authority. And in her heart of hearts, unconsciously, she felt that he was trying to get away from her. This she would never have acknowledged. She pitied him.

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. …

We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel and Fitzgerald’s best work; it’s set on the prosperous long island of 1922 and it criticises the prohibition-era in America. Fitzgerald uses many of these 1920s societal developments to tell his story, from automobilies to the allusions to bootlegging as the source of Gatsby’s fortune. It is an autobiographical novel, and becomes a symbol for the 1920s.

In this short passage his first meeting with Gatsby is told by Nick himself, in first person. We are not at the beginning of the story, but it’s important to notice that the real protagonist of the story hasn’t been presented yet, but only the narrator is. This aspect is very modern and Fitzgerald takes it from Conrad.     Nick continues in the description of the party, the vast majority of Gatsby’s guests are not personally invited to his home to enjoy his parties but simply arrive uninvited. Only Nick was really invited, and the fact that Gatsby personally invites Nick is important in fact suggests the desire to make a good impression on him. It’s never entirely clear why Gatsby invites Nick, but the story suggests it’s because Gatsby has discovered that Nick knows Daisy.                                                                                                                                               The party reflected the extremely rich atmosphere of this period and is the symbol of the life of the people in this period; people in fact lived an exaggerate life.  These people wanted to show their richness and their wealth, they showed up in expensive cars. They just want to have fun, go to parties, drink and dance.                          The final scene of this passage rappresents Nick while he was sitting near table and saw a man and a woman near him. This is the moment when Nick enters to the party atmosphere in fact even if he isn’t relax after drinking two finger bowls of champagne he starts to have fun.

Nick describes the Gatsby’s party. The parties reflected the society in that period: a period of economical prosperity. This decade is also known as the “crazy years” for its social, artistic and cultural dynamism. People lived an exaggerate life in a extremely rich atmosphere. Music and fashion of the time refelected the general desire to party and the most popular dance of the time, the charleston, captured the spirit of the age.                                                                                                                                                                                In the third line Nick describes the guests’s arrival in fact they show their automobiles and their richness. In this period in fact business was also booming helped by new means of transport like automobiles, but also there was the development of other technologic instrument such as telephones, movies and radio.                                                               In the second part of this passage Nick describes the situation in which he is near a man and a “rowdy girl”. This era was characterized in fact by a generation of young woman who were shorts skirt, bobbed their hair, listen to jazz music and they were seen as brash for wearing excessive make-up, drinking alchol, smoking cigarettes in public and treating sex. This woman reflected the typical woman of that period: a girl who loves sex, luxury and fun.                                                                                                                                                                              At the end of this passage we can see another important theme of that period: prohibition. It was introduced in the U.S. in 1919 banning the production, sale and consumption of any alcoholic drink. It was introduced to rase the moral tone of the country but it had the exactly opposite effect, in fact as a conseguence were born some organized crime and this prohibition was taken advantages by gangster. In this passage in fact we can see Nick who stops his stress and anxiety drinking a lot of alchol and only after that he started to have fun.

Links:

è italian: like Gatsby Mastro Don Gesualdo begins to get rich enought

è decadentism in fact this is the story of an impossible love

è Philosphy: Marx, Gatsby in fact is the personification of what Marx calls capitalist and he criticizes that type of person.

è History: the 20’s and the prhoibitionism

è English: the American dream

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby   

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At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

“Your face is familiar,” he said, politely. “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”

“Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun Battalion.”

“I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there——” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.” For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby  

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Text analysis :      S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby  

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"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care."

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Text analysis :      G. Orwell,  Animal Farm             

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Text analysis :      G. Orwell,  Animal Farm             

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1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

3. No animal shall wear clothes.

4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.

5. No animal shall drink alcohol.

6. No animal shall kill any other animal.

7. All animals are equal.”

“all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”

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War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

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Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

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Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window

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Text analysis: A. Ginsberg,  A supermarket in California   

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Text analysis: A. Ginsberg,  A supermarket in California   

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What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—

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Text analysis: S. Beckett  Waiting for Godot   

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Text analysis: S. Beckett  Waiting for Godot   

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A country road. A tree. Evening

Estragon. Let’s go.

Vladimir. We can’t.

Estragon. Why not? Vladimir. We’re waiting for Godot.

Estragon (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here?

Vladimir. What?

Estragon. That we were to wait.

Vladimir. He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?

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Text analysis: N. Mandela, Long way to Freedom            

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Text analysis: N. Mandela, Long way to Freedom            

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In life, every man has twin obligations – obligations to his family, to his parents, to his

wife and children; and he has an obligation to his people, his community, his country. In a civil

and human society, each man is able to fulfill those obligations according to his own inclinations and abilities. But in a country like South Africa, it was almost impossible for a man of my birth and color to fulfill both of those obligations. In South Africa, a man of color who attempted to live as a human being was punished and isolated. In South Africa, a man who tried to fulfill his duty to his people was inevitably ripped from his family and his home and was forced to live a life apart, a twilight existence of secrecy and rebellion.

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Text analysis: N. Mandela, Long way to Freedom
Text analysis: N. Mandela, Long way to Freedom            
In life, every man has twin obligations – obligations to his family, to his parents, to his
wife and children; and he has an obligation to his people, his community, his country. In a civil
and human society, each man is able to fulfill those obligations according to his own inclinations and abilities. But in a country like South Africa, it was almost impossible for a man of my birth and color to fulfill both of those obligations. In South Africa, a man of color who attempted to live as a human being was punished and isolated. In South Africa, a man who tried to fulfill his duty to his people was inevitably ripped from his family and his home and was forced to live a life apart, a twilight existence of secrecy and rebellion.
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