1.

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

Biography : Thomas Hardy was born on June , 1840, in Dorset, a rural region of southwestern England that was to become the focus of his fiction.

Hardy lived and wrote in a time of difficult social change, when England was making its slow transition from an old-fashioned, agricultural nation to a modern, industrial one. In Tess of the dUrbervilles and other novels, Hardy demonstrates his deep sense of moral sympathy for Englands lower classes , particularly for rural women and perhaps his most famous depiction of such a young woman is in Tess of the dUrbervilles. Tesss family in Tess of the dUrbervilles illustrates this change, as Tesss parents, the Durbeyfields, lose themselves in the fantas y of belonging to an aristocratic family, the dUrbervilles.

Plot Overview of the Tess dUbervilles

The poor peddler John Durbeyfield is stunned to learn that he is the descendent of an ancient noble family, the dUrbervilles. Meanwhile, Tess, his eldest daughter, joins the other village girls in the May Day dance, where Tess briefly exchanges glances with a young man. Mr. Durbeyfield a nd his wife decide to send Tess to the dUrberville mansion, where they hope Mrs. dUrberville will make Tesss fortune. In reality, Mrs. dUrberville is no relation to Tess at all: her husband, the merchant Simon Stokes, simply changed his name to dUrberville after he retired. But Tess does not know this fact, and when the lascivious Alec dUrberville, Mrs. dUrbervilles son, procures Tess a job tending fowls on the dUrberville estate, Tess has no choice but to accept, since she blames herself for an accident involving the familys horse, its only means of income. Tess spends several months at this job, resisting Alecs attempts to seduce her. Finally, Alec takes advantage of her in the woods one night after a fair. Tess knows she does not love Alec. She returns home to her family to give birth to Alecs child, whom she christens Sorrow. Sorrow dies soon after he is born, and

Tess spends a miserable year at home before deciding to seek work elsewhere. She finally accepts a job as a milkmaid at the Talboth ays Dairy. At Talbothays, Tess enjoys a period of contentment and happiness. She befriends three of her fellow milkmaidsIzz, Retty, and Marianand meets a man named Angel Clare, who turns out to be the man from the May Day dance at the beginning of the novel. Tess and Angel slowly fall in love. They grow closer throughout Tesss time at Talbothays, and she eventually accepts his proposal of marriage. Still, she is troubled by pangs of conscience and feels she should tell Angel about her past. She writes hi m a confessional note and slips it under his door, but it slides under the carpet and Angel never sees it. After their wedding, Angel and Tess both confess indiscretions: Angel tells Tess about an affair he had with an older woman in London, and Tess tells Angel about her history with Alec. Tess forgives Angel, but Angel cannot forgive Tess. He gives her some money and boards a ship bound for Brazil, where he thinks he might establish a farm. He tells Tess he will try to accept her past but warns her not to try to join him until he comes for her. Tess struggles. She has a difficult time finding work and is forced to take a job at an unpleasant and unprosperous farm. She tries to visit Angels family but overhears his brothers discussing Angels poor marriage , so she leaves. She hears a wandering preacher speak and is stunned to discover that he is Alec dUrberville, who has been converted to Christianity by Angels father, the Reverend Clare. Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec appallingly begs Tess never to tempt him again. Soon after, however, he again begs Tess to marry him, having turned his back on his religious ways. Tess learns from her sister Liza-Lu that her mother is near death, and Tess is forced to return home to take care of her. Her mother recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies soon after. When the family is evicted from their home, Alec offers help. But Tess refuses to accept, knowing he only wants to obligate her to him again. At last, Angel decides to forgive his wife. He leaves Brazil, desperate to find her. Instead, he finds her mother, who tells him Tess has gone to a village called Sandbourne. There, he finds Tess in an expensive boardinghouse called The Herons, where he tells her he has forgiven her and begs her to take him back. Tess tells him he has come too late. She was unable to resist and went back to

Alec dUrberville. Angel leaves in a daze, and, heartbroken to the point of madness, Tess goes upstairs and stabs her lover to death. When the landlady finds Alecs body, she raises an alarm, but Tess has already fled to find Angel. Angel agrees to help Tess, though he cannot quite believe that she has actually murdered Alec. They hide out in an empty mansion for a few days, then travel farther. When they come to Stonehenge, Tess goes to sleep, but when morning breaks shortly thereafter, a search party discovers them. Tess is arrested and sent to jail. Angel and Liza-Lu watch as a black flag is raised over the prison, signaling Tesss execution.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes . The Injustice of Existence Unfairness dominates the lives of Tess and her family to such an extent that it begins to seem like a general aspect of human existence in Tess of the dUrbervilles. Tess does not mean to kill Prince, but she is punished anyway, just as she is unfairly punished for her own rape by Alec. Nor is there justice waiting in heaven. Christianity teaches that there is compensation in the afterlife for unhappiness suffered in this life, but the only devout Christian encountered in the novel may be the reverend, Mr. Clare, who seems more or less content in his life anyway. For others in their misery, Christianity offers little solace of heavenly justice. Mrs. Durbeyfield never mentions otherworldly rewards. The converted Alec preaches heavenly justice for earthly sinners, but his faith seems shallow and insincere. Generally, the moral atmosphere of the novel is not Christian justice at all, but pagan injustice . The forces that rule human life are absolutely unpredictable and not necessarily well-disposed to us. The preChristian rituals practiced by the farm workers at the opening of the novel, and Tesss final rest at Stonehenge at the end, remind us of a world where the gods are not just and fair, but whimsical and uncaring . When the narrator concludes the novel with the statement that Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess, we are reminded that justice must be put in ironic quotation marks, since it is not really just at all. What passes for Justice is in fact one of the pagan gods enjoying a bit of sport, or a frivolous game.

Changing Ideas of Social Class in Victorian England Tess of the dUrbervilles presents complex pictures of both the importance of social class in nineteenth-century England and the difficulty of defining class in any simple way. Certainly the Durbeyfields are a powerful emblem of the way in which class is no longer evaluated in Vi ctorian times as it would have been in the Middle Agesthat is, by blood alone, with no attention paid to fortune or worldly success. Indubitably the Durbeyfields have purity of blood, yet for the parson and nearly everyone else in the novel, this fact amo unts to nothing more than a piece of genealogical trivia. In the Victorian context, cash matters more than lineage, which explains how Simon Stokes, Alecs father, was smoothly able to use his large fortune to purchase a lustrous family name and transform his clan into the Stoke-dUrbervilles. The dUrbervilles pass for what the Durbeyfields truly areauthentic nobilitysimply because definitions of class have changed. The issue of class confusion even affects the Clare clan, whose most promising son, Angel, is intent on becoming a farmer and marrying a milkmaid, thus bypassing the traditional privileges of a Cambridge education and a parsonage. His willingness to work side by side with the farm laborers helps endear him to Tess, and their acquaintance would not have been possible if he were a more traditional and elitist aristocrat. Thus, the three main characters in the Angel -Tess-Alec triangle are all strongly marked by confusion regarding their respective social classes, an issue that is one of the main concerns of the novel. Men Dominating Women One of the recurrent themes of the novel is the way in which men can dominate women, exerting a power over them linked primarily to their maleness. Sometimes this command is purposeful, in the mans full knowledge of his exploitation, as when Alec acknowledges how bad he is for seducing Tess for his own momentary pleasure. Alecs act of abuse, the most life-altering event that Tess experiences in the novel, is clearly the most serious instance of male domination over a female. But there are other, less blatant examples of womens passivity toward dominant men. When, after Angel reveals that he prefers Tess, Tesss friend Retty attempts suicide and her friend Marian becomes an alcoholic, which makes their earlier sch oolgirl-type crushes on Angel seem disturbing. This devotion is not merely fanciful love, but unhealthy obsession. These girls appear utterly dominated by a desire for a man who, we are told

explicitly, does not even realize that they are interested in him . This sort of unconscious male domination of women is perhaps even more unsettling than Alecs outward and self-conscious cruelty. Even Angels love for Tess, as pure and gentle as it seems, dominates her in an unhealthy way. Angel substitutes an idealized picture of Tesss country purity for the real-life woman that he continually refuses to get to know. When Angel calls Tess names like Daughter of Nature and Artemis, we feel that he may be denying her true self in favor of a mental image that he prefers. Thus, her identity and experiences are suppressed, albeit unknowingly. This pattern of male domination is finally reversed with Tesss murder of Alec, in which, for the first time in the novel, a woman takes active steps against a man. Of course, this act only leads to even greater suppression of a woman by men, when the crowd of male police officers arrest Tess at Stonehenge. Nevertheless, for just a moment, the accepted pattern of submissive women bowing to dominant men is interrupted, and Tesss act seems heroic. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes. Birds Images of birds recur throughout the novel, evoking or contradicting their traditional spiritual association with a higher realm of transcendence. Both the Christian dove of peace and the Romantic songbirds of Keats and Shelley, which symbolize sublime heights, lead us to expect that birds will have positive meaning in this novel. Tess occasionally hears birdcalls on her frequent hikes across the countryside; their free expressiveness stands in stark contrast to Tesss silent and constrained existence as a wronged and disgraced girl. When Tess goes to work for Mrs. dUrberville, she is surprised to find that the old womans pet finches are frequently released to fly free throughout the room. These birds offer images of hope and liberation. Yet there is irony attached to birds as well, making us doubt whether these images of hope and freedom are illusory. Mrs. dUrbervilles birds leave little white spots on the upholstery, which presumably some servantperhaps Tess herselfwill have to clean. It may be that freedom for one creature entails hardship for another, just as Alecs free enjoyment of Tesss body leads her to a lifetime of suffering. In the end, when Tess encounters the pheasants maimed by hunters and lying in agony,

birds no longer seem free, but rather oppressed and submissive. These pheasants are no Romantic songbirds hovering far above the Earth they are victims of earthly violence, condemned to suffer down below and never fly again. The Book of Genesis The Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is evoked repeatedly throughout Tess of the dUrbervilles, giving the novel a broader metaphysical and philosophical dimension. The roles of Eve and the serpent in paradise are clearly delineated: Angel is the noble Adam newly born, while Tess is the indecisive and troubled Eve. When Tess gazes upon Angel in Chap ter XXVII, she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam. Alec, with his open avowal that he is bad to the bone, is the conniving Satan. He seduces Tess under a tree, giving her sexual knowledge in return for her lost innocence. The very name of the forest where this seduction occurs, the Chase, suggests how Eve will be chased from Eden for her sins. This guilt, which will never be erased, is known in Christian theology as the original sin that all humans have inherited. Just as John Durbeyfield is told in Chapter I that you dont live anywhere, and his family is evicted after his death at the end of the novel, their homelessness evokes the human exile from Eden. Original sin suggests that humans have fallen from their once great status to a lower station in life, just as the dUrbervilles have devolved into the modern Durbeyfields. This Story of the Fallor of the Pure Drop, to recall the name of a pub in Tesss home villageis much more than a social fall. It is an explanation of how all of us humansnot only Tessnever quite seem to live up to our expectations, and are never able to inhabit the places of grandeur we feel we deserve. Variant Names The transformation of the dUrbervilles into the Durbeyfields is one example of the common phenomenon of renaming, or variant naming, in the novel. Names matter in this novel. Tess knows and accepts that she is a lowly Durbeyfield, but part of her still believes, as her parents also believe, that her aristocratic original name should be restored. John Durbeyfield goes a step further than Tess, and actually renames himself Sir John, as his tombstone epitaph shows. Another character who renames himself is Simon Stokes, Angels father, who purchased a family tree and made himself Simon Stoke-dUrberville. The question raised

by all these cases of name changing, whether successful or merely imagined, is the extent to which an altered name brings with it an altered identity. Alec acts notoriously ungentlemanly throughout the novel, but by the end, when he appears at the dUrberville family vault, his lordly and commanding bearing make him seem almost deserving of the name his father has bought, like a spoiled medieval nobleman. Hardys interest in name changes makes reality itself seem changeable according to whims of human perspective. The village of Blakemore, as we are reminded twice in Chapters I and II, is also known as Blackmoor, and indeed Hardy famously renames the southern English countryside as Wessex. He imposes a fictional map on a real place, with names altered correspondingly. Reality may not be as solid as the names people confer upon it. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Prince When Tess dozes off in the wagon and loses control, the resulting death of the Durbeyfield horse, Prince, spurs Tess to seek aid from the dUrbervilles, setting the events of the novel in motion. The horses demise is thus a powerful plot motivator, and its name a potent symbol of Tesss own claims to aristocracy. Like the horse, Tess herself bears a high-class name, but is doomed to a lowly life of physical labor. Interestingly, Princes death occurs right after Tess dreams of ancient knights, having just heard the news that her family is aristocratic. Moreover, the horse is pierced by the forward -jutting piece of metal on a mail coach, which is reminiscent of a wound one might receive in a medieval joust. In an odd way, Tesss dream of medieval glory comes true, and her horse dies a heroic death. Yet her dream of meeting a prince while she kills her own Prince, and with him her familys only means of financial sustenance, is a tragic foreshadowing of her own story. The death of the horse symbolizes the sacrifice of real-world goods, such as a useful animal or even her own honor, through excessive fantasizing about a better world. The dUrberville Family Vault A double-edged symbol of both the majestic grandeur and the lifeless hollowness of the aristocratic family name that the Durbeyfie lds learn they

possess, the dUrberville family vault represents both the glory of life and the end of life. Since Tess herself moves from passivity to active murder by the end of the novel, attaining a kind of personal grandeur even as she brings death to others and to herself, the double symbolism of the vault makes it a powerful site for the culminating meeting between Alec and Tess. Alec brings Tess both his lofty name and, indirectly, her own death later; it is natural that he meets her in the vault in dUrberville Aisle, where she reads her own name inscribed in stone and feels the presence of death. Yet the vault that sounds so glamorous when rhapsodized over by John Durbeyfield in Chapter I seems, by the end, strangely hollow and meaningless. When Alec stomps on the floor of the vault, it produces only a hollow echo, as if its basic emptiness is a complement to its visual grandeur. When Tess is executed, her ancestors are said to snooze on in their crypts, as if uncaring even about the fate of a membe r of their own majestic family. Perhaps the secret of the family crypt is that its grandiosity is ultimately meaningless. Brazil Rather surprising for a novel that seems set so solidly in rural England, the narration shifts very briefly to Brazil when Angel takes leave of Tess and heads off to establish a career in farming. Even more exotic for a Victorian English reader than America or Australia, Brazil is the country in which Robinson Crusoe made his fortune and it seems to promise a better life far from the humdrum familiar world. Brazil is thus more than a geographical entity on the map in this novel: it symbolizes a fantasyland, a place where dreams come true. As Angels name suggests, he is a lofty visionary who lacks some experience with the real world, despite all his mechanical know-how in farm management. He may be able to milk cows, but he does not yet know how to tell the difference between an exotic dream and an everyday reality, so inevitably his experience in the imagined dream world of Brazil is a disaster that he barely survives. His fiasco teaches him that ideals do not exist in life, and this lesson helps him reevaluate his disappointment with Tesss imperfections, her failure to incarnate the ideal he expected her to be. For Angel, Brazil s ymbolizes the impossibility of ideals, but also forgiveness and acceptance of life in spite of those disappointed ideals.
Key Facts

full title Tess of the dUrbervilles author Thomas Hardy type of work Novel genre Victorian, tragic language English time and place written 1880s, England date of first publication 1891 publisher Random House, but also published serially in different periodicals narrator Anonymous point of view The narrator speaks in the third person, and loo ks deep into the characters minds. The narrator is objective but has an omniscient understanding of future implications of characters actions as they happen. tone Realistic, pessimistic tense Past setting (time) The 1880s and 1890s setting (place) Wessex, the southwest of England protagonist Tess Durbeyfield major conflict Tess is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by the son of her upper-class patroness, making her unacceptable to her true love Angel later in life. rising action Tesss familys discovery that they are ancient English aristocracy, giving them all fantasies of a higher station in life; Tesss accidental killing of the family horse, which drives her to seek help from the dUrbervilles, where she is seduced and dishonore d.

climax Tesss new husband discovers her earlier seduction by Alec and decides to leave her, going off to Brazil and not answering her letters, and bringing Tess to despair. falling action Tesss last-ditch decision to marry Alec, who claims to love her; Angels return from Brazil to discover Tess marriage to her former seducer, and his meeting with Tess; Tesss murder of Alec and short-lived escape with Angel before being apprehended and executed themes The injustice of existence; changing ideas of social class in Victorian England; men dominating women motifs Birds; the Book of Genesis; variant names symbols Prince; the dUrberville family vault; Brazil foreshadowing Tesss killing of the pheasants foreshadows her own death by hanging; Alecs assertion that he will master Tess again foreshadows his reemergence in her life

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It is Hardy's penultimate novel, followed by Jude the Obscure. Though now considered an important work of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy's day.
Summary of the novel Phase the First: The Maiden (111)

The novel is set in impoverished rural Wessex during the Long Depression. Tess is the eldest child of John and Joan Durbeyfield, uneducated rural peasants. One day, Parson Tringham informs John that he has noble blood. Tringham, an amateur genealogist, has discovered that "Durbeyfield" is a corruption of

"D'Urberville", the surname of a noble Norman family, now extinct. The news immediately goes to John's head. That same day, Tess participates in the village May Dance, where she meets Angel Clare, youngest son of Reverend James Clare, who is on a walking tour with his two brothers. Tess's father, overjoyed with learning of his noble lineage, gets too drunk to drive to market that night, so Tess undertakes the journey herself. However, she falls asleep at the reins, and the family's only horse , Prince, encounters a speeding wagon and is fatally wounded. Tess feels so guilty over the horse's death that she agrees, against her better judgement, to visit Mrs. d'Urberville, a wealthy widow who lives in the nearby town of Trantridge, and "claim kin." She is unaware that in reality, Mrs. d'Urberville's husband, Simon Stoke, purchased the baronial title and adopted the new surname, and so i s not related to the d'Urbervilles. Tess does not succeed in meeting Mrs. d'Urberville, but her libertine son Alec takes a fancy to Tess and secures her a position as poultry keeper on the d'Urberville estate. He immediately begins making advances. Tess dislikes Alec and repels him verbally but endures his persistent unwanted attention, feeling she has no choice, as she must earn enough to replace her family's only means of support, the dead horse. The threat that Alec presents to Tess's virtue is obscured for Tess by her inexperience and almost daily commonplace interactions with him. He calls her "coz" (cousin), indicating a male protector, not a ravisher. Late one night, walking home from town with some other Trantridge villagers, Tess inadvertently antagonises Car Darch, Alec's most recently discarded favourite, and finds herself about to come to blows. When Alec rides up and offers to "rescue" her from the situation, she accepts. He does not take her home, however, but rides through the fog until they reach an ancient grove called "The Chase." Here, Alec informs her that he is lost and leaves on foot to get his bearings. Tess stays behind and falls asleep atop the coat he lent her. After Alec returns he rapes her. The rape is also alluded to in another chapter, with reference to the "screams heard in the Chase" during the season Tess was at Tantridge.
Phase the Second: Maiden No More (1215)

After a few weeks of confused dalliance with Alec, Tess begins to despise him. Against his wishes, she goes home to her father's cottage, where she keeps almost entirely to her room. The next summer, she gives birth to a sickly boy, who lives only a few weeks. On his last night alive, Tess baptises him herself, after her father locked the doors to keep the parson away. The child is given the name 'Sorrow'. Tess buries Sorrow in unconsecrated ground, makes a homemade cross and lays flowers on his grave in an empty marmalade jar.
Phase the Third: The Rally (1624)

More than two years after the Trantridge debacle, Tess, now 20, is ready to make a new start. She seeks employment outside the village, where her past is not known, and secures a job as a milkmaid at Talbothays Dairy, working for Mr. and Mrs. Crick. There, she befriends three of her fellow milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian, and re-encounters Angel Clare, who is now an apprentice farmer and has come to Talbothays to learn dairy management.
Phase the Fourth: The Consequence (2534)

Angel spends a few days away from the dairy visiting his family at Emminster. His brothers Felix and Cuthbert, ordained ministers both, note An gel's coarsened manners, while Angel considers his brothers staid and narrow minded. Following evening prayers, Angel discusses his marriage prospects with his father. The Clares have long hoped that Angel would marry Mercy Chant, a pious schoolmistress, but Angel argues that a wife who knows farm life would be a more practical choice. He tells his parents about Tess, and they agree to meet her. His father, the Reverend James Clare, tells Angel abo ut his efforts to convert the local populace, and mentions his failure to tame a young miscreant named Alec d'Urberville. Angel returns to Talbothays Dairy and asks Tess to marry him. This puts Tess in a painful dilemma: Angel obviously thinks her a virgin and, although she does not want to deceive him, she shrinks from confessing lest she lose his love and admiration. Such is her passion for him that she finally agrees to the marriage, explaining that she hesitated because she had heard he hated old families and thought he would not approve of her d'Urberville ancestry. However, he is pleased by this news, because he thinks it will make their match more suitable in the eyes of his family.

As the marriage approaches, Tess grows increasingly troubled. She writes to her mother for advice; Joan tells her to keep silent about her past. Her anxiety increases when a man from Trantridge, named Groby, recognises her while she is out shopping with Angel and crudely alludes to her sexual history. Angel overhears and flies into an uncharacteristic rage. Tess resolves to deceive Angel no more, and writes a letter describing her dealings with d'Urberville and slips it under his door. After Angel greets her with the usual affection the next morning, she discovers the letter under his carpet and realises that he has not seen it. She destroys it. The wedding goes smoothly although a bad omen of a cock crowing in the afternoon is noticed by Tess. Tess and Angel spend their wedding night at an old d'Urberville family mansion, where Angel presents his bride with some beautiful diamonds that belonged to his godmother and confesses that he once had a brief affair with an older woman in London. When she hears this story, Tess feels sure that Angel will forgive her own indiscretion, and finally tells him about her relationship with Alec.
Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays (3544)

Angel, however, is appalled by Tess' confession, and spends the wedding night on a sofa. Tess, devastated, accepts the sudden estrangement as something she deserves. After a few awkward, awful days, she suggests they separate, saying that she will return to her parents. Angel gives her some money and promises to try to reconcile himself to her past, but warns her not to try to join him until he sends for her. After a quick visit to his parents, Angel takes ship for Brazil to start a new life. Before he leaves, he encounters Izz Huett on the road and impulsively asks her to come to Brazil with him, as his mistress. She accepts, but when he asks her how much she loves him, she admits "Nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! She would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!" Hearing this, he abandons the whim, and Izz goes home weeping bitterly. Tess returns home for a time but, finding this unbearable, decides to join Marian and Izz at a starve-acre farm called Flintcomb-Ash. On the road, she is recognised and insulted by a farmer named Groby (the same man who slighted her in front of Angel); this man proves to be her new employer. At the farm, the three former milkmaids perform very hard physical labour.

One day, Tess attempts to visit Angel's family at the parsonage in Emminster. As she nears her destination, she encounters Angel's priggish older brothers and the woman his parents once hoped he would marry, Mercy Chant. They do not recognise her, but she overhears them discussing Angel's unwise marriage. Shamed, she turns back. On the wa y, she overhears a wandering preacher and is shocked to discover that he is Alec d'Urberville, who has been converted to Christianity under the Reverend James Clare's influence.
Phase the Sixth: The Convert (4552)

Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec begs Tess never to tempt him again as they stand beside an ill -omened stone monument called the Cross-in-Hand. However, Alec soon comes to Flintcomb -Ash to ask Tess to marry him. She tells him she is already married. He returns at Candlemas and again in early spring, when Tess is hard at work feeding a threshing machine. He tells her he is no longer a preacher and wants her to be with him. She slaps him when he insults Angel, drawing blood. Tess then learns from her sister, Liza-Lu, that her father, John, is ill and that her mother is dying. Tess rushes home to look after them. Her mother soon recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies. The family is evicted from their home, as Durbeyfield held only a life lease on their cottage. Alec tells Tess that her husband is never coming back and offers to house the Durbeyfields on his estate. Tess refuses his assistance. She had earlier written Angel a psalm-like letter, full of love, self-abasement, and pleas for mercy; now, however, she finally admits to herself that Angel has wronged her and scribbles a hasty note saying that she will do all she can t o forget him, since he has treated her so unjustly. The Durbeyfields plan to rent some rooms in the town of Kingsbere, ancestral home of the d'Urbervilles, but they arrive there to find that the rooms have already been rented to another family. All but des titute, they are forced to take shelter in the churchyard, under the D'Urberville window. Tess enters the church and in the d'Urberville Aisle, Alec reappears and importunes Tess again. In despair, she looks at the entrance to the d'Urberville vault and wo nders aloud, "Why am I on the wrong side of this door?" In the meantime, Angel has been very ill in Brazil and, his farming venture having failed, he heads home to England. On the way, he confides his troubles

to a stranger, who tells him that he was wrong to leave his wife; what she was in the past should matter less than what she might become. Angel begins to repent his treatment of Tess.
Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment (5359)

Upon his return to his family home, Angel has two letters waiting for him: Tess's angry note and a few cryptic lines from "two well -wishers" (Izz and Marian), warning him to protect his wife from "an enemy in the shape of a friend." He sets out to find Tess and eventually locates Joan, now well-dressed and living in a pleasant cottage. After responding evasively to his enquiries, she finally tells him her daughter has gone to live in Sandbourne, a fashionable seaside resort. There, he finds Tess living in an expensive boarding house under the name "Mrs. d'Urberville." When he asks for her, she appear s in startlingly elegant attire and stands aloof. He tenderly asks her forgiveness, but Tess, in anguish, tells him he has come too late; thinking he would never return, she yielded at last to Alec d'Urberville's persuasion and has become his mistress. She gently asks Angel to leave and never come back. He departs, and Tess returns to her bedroom, where she falls to her knees and begins a lamentation. She blames Alec for causing her to lose Angel's love a second time, accusing Alec of having lied when he said that Angel would never return to her. The landlady, Mrs. Brooks, tries to listen in at the keyhole, but withdraws hastily when the argument becomes heated. She later sees Tess leave the house, then notices a spreading red spot a bloodstain on the ceiling. She summons help, and Alec is found stabbed to death in his bed. Angel, totally disheartened, has left Sandbourne; Tess hurries after him and tells him that she has killed Alec, saying that she hopes she has won his forgiveness by murdering the man who ruined both their lives. Angel doesn't believe her at first, but grants his forgiveness as she is in such a fevered state and tells her that he loves her. Rather than head for the coast, they walk inland, vaguely planning to hide somewhere until th e search for Tess is ended and they can escape abroad from a port. They find an empty mansion and stay there for five days in blissful happiness, until their presence is discovered one day by the cleaning woman. They continue walking and, in the middle of the night, stumble upon Stonehenge, giving the allusion of Tess as a sacrificial victim to a society that

shunned her. Tess lies down to rest on an ancient altar. Before she falls asleep , she asks Angel to look after her younger sister, Liza-Lu, saying that she hopes Angel will marry her after she is dead. At dawn, Angel sees that they are surrounded by police. He finally realises that Tess really has committed murder and asks the men in a whisper to let her awaken naturally before they arrest her. When she opens her eyes and sees the police, she tells Angel she is "almost glad" because "now I shall not live for you to despise me". She is allowed a dignified death through the fact that Angel listens to her (he hasn't throughout the rest of the novel) and through her parting words of "I am ready". Tess is escorted to Wintoncester ( Winchester) prison. The novel closes with Angel and Liza-Lu watching from a nearby hill as the black flag signalling Tess's execution is raised over the prison. Angel and Liza-Lu then join hands and go on their way.
[edit] Symbolism and themes

Hardy's writing often illustrates the "ache of modernism", and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted, [4] portrays "the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them". Hardy describes modern farm machinery with infernal imagery; al so, at the dairy, he notes that the milk sent to the city must be watered down because the townspeople can not stomach whole milk. Angel's middle-class fastidiousness makes him reject Tess, a woman whom Hardy often portrays as a sort of Wessex Eve, in harmony with the natural world. When he parts from her and goes to Brazil, the handsome young man gets so sick that he is reduced to a "mere yellow skeleton." All these instances are typically interpreted as indications of the negative consequences of man's separation from nature, both in the creation o f destructive machinery and in the inability to rejoice in pure nature. Another important theme of the novel is the sexual double standard to which Tess falls victim; despite being, in Hardy's view, a truly good woman, she is despised by society after losing her virginity before marriage. From numerous pagan and neo-Biblical references made about her, Tess has been viewed variously as an Earth goddess or as a sacrificial victim . Early in the novel, she participates in a festival for Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and when she performs a baptism she chooses a passage from Genesis, the book of

creation, over more traditional New Testament verses. At the end, when Tess and Angel come to Stonehenge, commonly believed in Hardy's time to be a pagan temple, she willingly lies down on an altar, thus fulfilling her destiny as a human sacrifice. This symbolism may help explain Tess as a personification of nature lovely, fecund, and exploitable while animal imagery throughout the novel strengthens the association. Examples are numerous: Tess's misfortunes begin when she falls asleep while driving Prince to market, thus causing the horse's death; at Trantridge, she becomes a poultry-keeper; she and Angel fall in love amid cows in the fertile Froom valley; and on the road to Flintcombe -Ashe, she kills some wounded pheasants to end their suffering

2. HENRY JAMES
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843 and was raised in Manhattan. James's father, a prominent intellectual and social theorist, traveled a great deal to Geneva, Paris, and London, so Henry and his brother, William, accompanied him and virtually grew up in those locations as well. As a child, James was shy, delicate, and had a difficult time mixing with other boys his brother, who was much more active, called him a sissy. William James, of course, went on to become a great American philosopher, while Henry became one of the nation's preeminent novelists. The James family moved to Boston when Henry was a teenager, and Henry briefly attended Harvard Law School . But he soon dropped out in order to concentrate on his writing. He found success early and often: William Dean Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, befriended the young writer, and by his mid- twenties James was considered one of the most skilled writers in America. In novels such as The American, The Europeans, and Daisy Miller, James perfected a unique brand of psychological realism, taking as his primary subject the social maneuverings of the upper classes, particularly the situation of Americans living in Europe. For James, America represented optimism and innocence, while Europe represented decadence and social sophistication; James himself moved to Europe early on in his professional career and was naturalized as a British citizen in 1915 to protest America's failure to enter World War I.

Throughout his career, James earned criticism for the slow pacing and uneventful plotting of his novels, as well as for his elliptical technique, in which many of a work's important scenes are not narrated, but only implied by later scenes. But as a stylist James earned consistent admiration; he is often considered to be a "writer's writer," and his prose is remarkable for its elegance of balance, clarity, and precision. First written in the 1880s and extensively revised in 1908, The Portrait of a Lady is often considered to be James's greatest achievement. In it, he explored many of his most characteristic themes, including the conflict between American individualism and European social custom and the situatio n of Americans in Europe. It also includes many of his most memorable characters, including the lady of the novel's title, Isabel Archer, the indomitable Mrs. Touchett, the wise and funny Ralph Touchett, the fast-talking Henrietta Stackpole, and the sinister villains, Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. While he was a dedicated observer of human beings in society, James was a socially distant man who formed few close friendships. He never married and openly claimed to practice celibacy. Perhaps this gave him t ime to write: in four decades of his writing career, he produced nearly 100 books, including such classics as The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and the immortal ghost story "The Turn of the Screw." He died on February 28, 1916, shortly after receiving the English Order of Merit for his dedication to the British cause in World War I.
Plot Overview

Isabel Archer is a woman in her early twenties who comes from a genteel family in Albany, New York, in the late 1860s. Her mother died when she was a young girl, and her father raised her in a haphazard manner, allowing her to educate herself and encouraging her independence. As a result, the adult Isabel is widely read, imaginative, confident in her own mind, and slightly narcissistic; she has the reputation in Albany for being a formidable intellect, and as a result she often seems intimidating to men. She has had few suitors, but one of them is Caspar Goodwood, the powerful, charismatic son of a wealthy Boston mill owner. Isabel is drawn to Caspar, but her c ommitment to her independence makes her fear him as well, for she feels that to marry him would be to sacrifice her freedom.

Shortly after Isabel's father dies, she receives a visit from her indomitable aunt, Mrs. Touchett, an American who lives in Europe. Mrs. Touchett offers to take Isabel on a trip to Europe, and Isabel eagerly agrees, telling Caspar that she cannot tell him whether she wishes to marry him until she has had at least a year to travel in Europe with her aunt. Isabel and Mrs. Touchett leave for England, where Mrs. Touchett's estranged husband is a powerful banker. Isabel makes a strong impression on everyone at Mr. Touchett's county manor of Gardencourt: her cousin Ralph, slowly dying of a lung disorder, becomes deeply devoted to her, and the Touchetts' aristocratic neighbor Lord Warburton falls in love with her. Warburton proposes, but Isabel declines; though she fears that she is passing up a great social opportunity by not marrying Warburton, she still believes that marriage would damage h er treasured independence. As a result, she pledges to accomplish something wonderful with her life, something that will justify her decision to reject Warburton. Isabel's friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American journalist, believes that Europe is changing Isabel, slowly eroding her American values and replacing them with romantic idealism. Henrietta comes to Gardencourt and secretly arranges for Caspar Goodwood to meet Isabel in London. Goodwood again presses Isabel to marry him; this time, she tells him she needs at least two years before she can answer him, and she promises him nothing. She is thrilled to have exercised her independence so forcefully. Mr. Touchett's health declines, and Ralph convinces him that when he dies, he should leave half his wealt h to Isabel: this will protect her independence and ensure that she will never have to marry for money. Mr. Touchett agrees shortly before he dies. Isabel is left with a large fortune for the first time in her life. Her inheritance piques the interest of M adame Merle, Mrs. Touchett's polished, elegant friend; Madame Merle begins to lavish attention on Isabel, and the two women become close friends. Isabel travels to Florence with Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle; Merle introduces Isabel to a man named Gilbert Osmond, a man of no social standing or wealth, but whom Merle describes as one of the finest gentlemen in Europe, wholly devoted to art and aesthetics. Osmond's daughter Pansy is being broug ht up in a convent; his wife is dead. In secret, Osmond and Merle have a mysterious relationship; Merle is attempting to manipulate Isabel into marrying Osmond so that he will have access to her fortune. Osmond is pleased to marry Isabel, not only for her money, but also because she makes a fine addition to his collection of art objects.

Everyone in Isabel's world disapproves of Osmond, especially Ralph, but Isabel chooses to marry him anyway. She has a child the year after they are married, but the boy dies six months after he is born. Three years into their marriage, Isabel and Osmond have come to despise one another; they live with Pansy in a palazzo in Rome, where Osmond treats Isabel as barely a member of the family: to him, she is a social hostess and a source of wealth, and he is annoyed by her independence and her insistence on having her own opinions. Isabel chafes against Osmond's arrogance, his selfishness, and his sinister desire to crush her individuality, but she does not consider leaving him. F or all her commitment to her independence, Isabel is also committed to her social duty, and when she married Osmond, she did so with the intention of transforming herself into a good wife. A young American art collector who lives in Paris, Edward Rosier, comes to Rome and falls in love with Pansy; Pansy returns his feelings. But Osmond is insistent that Pansy should marry a nobleman, and he says that Rosier is neither rich nor highborn enough. Matters grow complicated when Lord Warburton arrives on the scene and begins to court Pansy. Warburton is still in love with Isabel and wants to marry Pansy solely to get closer to her. But Osmond desperately wants to see Pansy married to Warburton. Isabel is torn about whether to fulfill her duty to her husband and he lp him arrange the match between Warburton and Pansy, or to fulfill the impulse of her conscience and discourage Warburton, while helping Pansy find a way to marry Rosier. At a ball one night, Isabel shows Warburton the dejected-looking Rosier and explains that this is the man who is in love with Pansy. Guiltily, Warburton admits that he is not in love with Pansy; he quietly arranges to leave Rome. Osmond is furious with Isabel, convinced that she is plotting intentionally to humiliate him. Madame Merle is also furious with her, confronting her with shocking impropriety and demanding brazenly to know what she did to Warburton. Isabel has realized that there is something mysterious about Madame Merle's relationship with her husband; now, she suddenly realizes that Merle is his lover. At this time, Ralph is rapidly deteriorating, and Isabel receives word that he is dying. She longs to travel to England to be with him, but Osmond forbids it. Now Isabel must struggle to decide whether to obey his command and rema in true to her marriage vows or to disregard him and hurry to her cousin's bedside.

Encouraging her to go, Osmond's sister, the Countess Gemini, tells her that there is still more to Merle and Osmond's relationship. Merle is Pansy's mother; Pansy was born out of wedlock. Osmond's wife died at about the same time, so Merle and Osmond spread the story that she died in childbirth. Pansy was placed in a convent to be raised, and she does not know that Merle is her real mother. Isabel is shocked and disgusted by her husband's atrocious behavior she even feels sorry for Merle for falling under his spell so she decides to follow her heart and travel to England. After Ralph's death, Isabel struggles to decide whether to return to her husband or not. She promised Pansy that she would return to Rome, and her commitment to social propriety impels her to go back and honor her marriage. But her independent spirit urges her to flee from Osmond and find happiness elsewhere. Caspar Goodwood appears at the funeral, and afterwards, he asks Isabel to run away with him and forget about her husband. The next day, unable to find her, Goodwood asks Henrietta where she has gone. Henrietta quietly tells him that Isabel has returned to Rome, unable to break away from her marriage to Gi lbert Osmond.

The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 188081 and then as a book in 1881. It is one of James's most popular long novels, and is regarded by critics as one of his finest. The Portrait of a Lady is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who "affronts her destiny" and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. Like many of James's novels, it is set mostly in Europe, mostly England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of James's early period, this novel reflects James's continuing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old, often to the detriment of the former. It also treats in a profound way the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal.

[edit] Major themes

James's first idea for The Portrait of a Lady was simple: a young American woman confronting her destiny, whatever it might be. Only then did he begin to form a plot to bring out the character of his central figure. This was the uncompromising story of the free-spirited Isabel losing her freedomdespite (or because of) suddenly coming into a great deal of money and getting "ground in the very mill of the conventional." It is a rather existentialist novel, as Isabel is very committed to living with the consequences of her choice with integrity but also a sort of stubbornness. The richness of The Portrait is hardly exhausted by a review of Isabel's character. The novel exhibits a huge panorama of trans -Atlantic life, a far larger canvas than any James had previously painted. This moneyed world appears charming and leisurely but proves to be plagued with treachery, deceit, and suffering.
[edit] Literary significance & criticism

The Portrait of a Lady received critical acclaim since its first publication in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, and it remains the most popular of James's longer fictions. Contemporary critics recognized that James had pushed the analysis of human consciousness and motivation to new levels, particularly in such passages as the famous Chapter 42, where Isabel meditates deep into the night about her marriage and the trap she seems to have fallen into. James made an in-depth account of Isabel's deepest terrors in his preface to the New York Edition of the novel. More recent criticism has come at the novel from feminist, sociopolitical and formalist directions, though some critics have demurred at these approaches as somewhat anachronistic for what remains, after all, very much a product of the Victorian era. In particular, Isabel's final return to Osmond has fascinated critics, who have debated whether James sufficiently justifies this seemingly paradoxical rejection of freedom. One interpretation is that Isabel not only feels as honor-bound to the promise she has made to stepdaughter Pansy as she does to Osmond, but also considers that the scene her "unacceptable" trip to England

will create with Osmond will leave her in a more justifiable position to abandon her dreadful marriage. The extensive revisions James made for the 1908 New York Edition have generally been accepted as improvements, unlike the changes in other texts, such as The American or Roderick Hudson. The revision of the final scene between Isabel and Goodwood has been especially applauded. As Edward Wagenknecht noted, James "makes it as clear as any modern novelist could make it by using all the four-letter words in the dictionary that [Isabel] has been roused as never before in her life, roused in the true sense perhaps for the first time in her life." James's verbal magic allowed him to both obey and evade the restrictive conventions of his day for the treatment of sexuality in literature. Critic Alfred Habegger has claimed that the main character of Portrait was inspired by Christie Archer, the protagonist from Anne Moncure Crane's novel, Reginald Archer (1871). Crane (18381872) may have influenced James, who Habegger claimed was interested in Cranes female characters. In the preface to the New York Edition of the novel, James referred to several of George Eliot's female protagonists as possible influences on the Portrait. Habegger questions this claim and quotes other s as doing the same. [1] Another critical article is "Rewriting Misogyny: Portrait of a Lady and the Popular Fiction Debate" by Paul M. Hadella. The author also mentions the similarities with Crane's novel. [2]

3. JOSEPH CONRAD
Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857. His father was a Polish revolutionary, so Joseph spent his youth with several different relatives in several different places. In 1874, he first went to sea. For the next twenty years he made his living as a sailor, joining the English merchant service in 1878 and eventually becoming a ship captain. In his twenties, after joining the English fleet, Conrad anglicized his Slavic name and learned English. He did not begin to write until he was in his forties. Lord Jim is the first of his major novels. It appeared in 1900, the year after Heart of Darkness, which is perhaps his bestknown work. Conrad was only moderately successful during his lifetime, although he moved in prominent literary circles and was friends w ith people like Henry James and Ford Madox Ford; with the latter he coauthored several works. Conrad was writing at the very moment when the Victorian Age was disappearing and the modern era was emerging. Victorian moral codes still influenced the plots of novels, but such principles were no longer absolute. Novelists and poets were beginning to experiment with form. The jumbled time sequence and elaborate narrative frames of Lord Jim are part of this movement. As Conrad wrote in the preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', another of his novels, fiction wanted to "strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music." Lord Jim, with its insistence on the frequent inability of language to com municate straightforwardly, opens itself to new ways of using words. A term as elusive as "inscrutable" may contain within itself the immediately comprehensible essence of the novel's protagonist, while a simple word like "water" may fracture into a multiplicity of meanings, each one available to only a single individual. The sun hadn't set yet on Victoria's empire, however; in fact, it was at its zenith. While this is one of Conrad's novels least involved in the set of issues surrounding colonialism, Lord Jim nevertheless situates itself in a world where national differences are often reduced to the dichotomy of "us" and "them," where the term "us" can encompass a surprisingly heterogeneous group. Both economic and racial versions of the colonial dynamic co me into play in this novel.

When Conrad died in 1924, the first World War had come and gone, and modernism dominated literature. The new world was one in which a novel like Lord Jim, in which an older set of ideals about heroism do combat with a modern sense of troubled personal identity, could no longer be written with serious intent. Works like The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury, which feature the same sort of conflict, present the struggle as absurd and futile, and no longer profound. Lord Jim comes out of a unique and very specific moment in time.
Summary

Lord Jim is the story of a man named Marlow's struggle to tell and to understand the life story of a man named Jim. Jim is a promising young man who goes to sea as a youth. He rises quickly thr ough the ranks and soon becomes chief mate. Raised on popular sea literature, Jim constantly daydreams about becoming a hero, yet he has never faced any real danger. Finally, his chance comes. He is serving aboard a vessel called the Patna, carrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, when the ship strikes an underwater object and springs a leak. With a storm approaching, the crew abandons her and her passengers to their fate. Jim, not thinking clearly, abandons the ship with the rest of the crew. The Patna does not sink, however, and Jim, along with the rest of the officers, is subjected to an official inquiry by his fellow seamen. It is at this inquiry, where Jim is stripped of his officer's certification, that he first meets Marlow. Seeing something in Jim that he recognizes, or perhaps fears, in himself, Marlow strikes up a tortured friendship with Jim. Jim tells him his story, and Marlow helps him obtain a series of jobs. The Patna incident haunts him, though; each time it is mentioned, Jim flees his current situa tion, enlisting Marlow's help once again. Finally, with the help of Stein, an expatriate trader, Marlow gets Jim situated as post manager in the remote territory of Patusan. Jim is initially captured by one of the warring factions of the area, but soon esc apes and finally becomes a hero by defeating a local bandit. He falls in love with Jewel, the beautiful, half-native stepdaughter of the previous trading post manager, a bitter little man called Cornelius. Jim becomes the spiritual leader of Patusan. Its citizens place their trust in him and rely on him to enforce justice. One day, Gentleman Brown, a pirate, shows up in Patusan with his crew in search of provisions. A skirmish ensues, and Brown holes up atop a hill.

Cornelius, annoyed by Jim's success and his own failures, secretly meets with Brown and a conspiracy, including a dissenting Patusan faction, is formed against Jim. Jim, unaware of the plot, agrees to let Brown leave the area peacefully (Brown guesses at Jim's dishonorable past, and Jim decides i t would be still more dishonorable to kill Brown simply because Brown knows the truth about him). Cornelius guides Brown down an alternate river channel, which leads him to the camp of Dain Waris, the son of Jim's closest ally, Doramin. Brown and his men ambush the camp, killing Dain Waris. Jim, realizing that he has still not been able to escape his initial failure aboard the Patna, ignores Jewel's pleas and goes to Doramin's compound, where the grieving father shoots and kills him. Much of the novel is concerned with Marlow's attempts to piece together Jim's story from a variety of sources. Finally, he recounts the story to a group of acquaintances. At this point in time, though, Brown has not yet come to Patusan, and the story remains unfinished. Once events are completed, Marlow writes them down in manuscript form, which he then sends to a member of the audience of the first part of the story. The novel fragments time, and Marlow juxtaposes different, non-chronological pieces of Jim's story for maximum effect, all the while seeking to discover the source of his own fascination with Jim and the meaning behind the story.

Jim (his surname is never disclosed), a young British seaman, becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they are picked up by a British ship. However, the Patna and its passengers are later also saved, and the reprehensible actions of the crew are exposed. The other participants evade the judicial court of inquiry, leaving Jim to the court alone. The court strips him of his navigation command certificate for his dereliction of duty. Jim is angry with himself, both for his moment of weakness, and for missing an opportunity to be a 'hero'.

At the trial, he meets Marlow, a sea captain, who in spite of his initial misgivings over what he sees as Jim's moral unsoundness, comes to befriend him, for he is "one of us". Marlow later finds Jim work as a ship chandler's clerk. Jim tries to remain incognito, but whenever the opprobrium of the Patna incident catches up with him, he abandons his place and moves further east. At length, Marlow's friend Stein suggests placing Jim as his factor in Patusan, a remote inland settlement with a mixed Malay and Bugis population, where Jim's past can remain hidden. While living on the island he acquires the title 'Tuan' ('Lord').[1] Here, Jim wins the respect of the people and becomes their leader by relieving them from the predations of the bandit Sherif Ali and protecting them from the corrupt local Malay chief, Rajah Tunku Allang. Jim wins the love of Jewel, a woman of mixed race, and is "satisfied... nearly". The end comes a few years later, when the town is attacked by the marauder "Gentleman" Brown. Although Brown and his gang are driven off, Dain Waris, the son of the leader of the Bugis community, is slain. Jim continues the conflict and willingly t akes a fatal bullet in the chest, fired by Dain Waris's father Doramin as retribution for the death of his son. Marlow is also the narrator of three of Conrad's other works: Heart of Darkness, Youth, and Chance.
[edit] Inspiration

The crucial event in Lord Jim may have been based in part on an actual abandonment of a ship. On 17 July 1880, S.S. Jeddah sailed from Singapore bound for Penang and Jeddah, with 778 men, 147 women and 67 children on board. The passengers were Muslims from the Malay states, traveling to Mecca for the hajj (holy pilgrimage). Jeddah sailed under the British flag and was crewed largely by British officers. After rough weather conditions, the Jeddah began taking in water. The hull sprang a large leak, the water rose rapidly, and the captain and officers abandoned the heavily listing ship. They were picked up by another vessel and taken to Aden where they told a story of violent passengers and a foundering ship. The pilgrims were left to their fate, and apparently certain death. However, on 8 August 1880 a French steamship towed Jeddah into Aden - the pilgrims had survived. An official inquiry followed, as it does in the novel. [2]

The second part of the novel is based in some part on the life of James Brooke, the first Rajah of Sarawak.[3] Brooke was an Indian-born English adventurer who in the 1840s managed to gain power and set up an independent state in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. Some critics, however, think that the fictiona l Patusan is to be found not in Borneo but in Sumatra.[4]
[edit] Critical interpretation

The novel is in two main parts, firstly Jim's lapse aboard the Patna and his consequent fall, and secondly an adventure story about Jim's rise and the tale's denouement in the fictional country of Patusan, presumed a part of the Indonesian archipelago. The main themes surround young Jim's potential ("...he was one of us", says Marlow, the narrator) thus sharpening the drama and tragedy of his fall, his subsequent struggle to redeem himself, and Conrad's further hints that personal character flaws will almost certainly emerge given an appropriate catalyst. Conrad, speaking through his character Stein, called Jim a romantic figure, and indeed Lord Jim is arguably Conrad's most romantic novel. [5] In addition to the lyricism and beauty of Conrad's descriptive writing, the novel is remarkable for its sophisticated structure. The bulk of the novel is told in the form of a story recited by the character Marlow to a group of listeners, and the conclusion is presented in the form of a letter from Marlow. Within Marlow's narration, other characters also tell their own stories in nested dialogue. Thus, events in the novel are described from several view points, and often out of chronological order. The reader is left to form an impression of Jim's interior psychological state from these multiple external points of view. Some critics (using deconstruction) contend that this is impossible and that Jim must forever remain an enigma, [6] whereas others argue that there is an absolute reality the reader can perceive and that Jim's actions may be ethically judged. [7] Marlow remarks of the trial: "They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!" Ultimately, Jim remains mysterious, as seen through a mist: "that mist in which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines - a straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks... It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the

sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." It is only through Marlow's recitation that Jim lives for us - the relationship between the two men incites Marlow to "tell you the story, to try to hand over to you, as it were, its very existence, its reality - the truth disclosed in a moment of illusion." Postcolonial interpretation of the novel, while not as intensive as that of Heart of Darkness, points to similar themes in the two novels - its protagonist sees himself as part of a 'civilizing mission', and the story involves a 'heroic adventure' at the height of the British Empire's hegemony. [1] Conrad's use of a protagonist with a dubious history has been interpreted as an expression of increasing doubts with regard to the Empire's mission; literary critic Elleke Boehmer sees the novel, along with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as part of a growing suspicion that 'a primitive and demoralizing other' is present within the governing order. [1]

4. VIRGINIA WOOLF
Virginia Woolf, the English novelist, critic, and essayist, was born on January 25, 1882, to Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, and Julia Duckworth Stephen. Woolf grew up in an upper-middle-class, socially active, literary family in Victorian London. She had three full siblings, two half-brothers, and two halfsisters. She was educated at home, becoming a voracious reader of the books in her fathers extensive library. Tragedy first afflicted the family when Woolfs mother died in 1895, then hit again two years later, when her half-sister, Stella, the caregiver in the Stephen family, died. Woolf experienced her first bout of mental illness after her mothers death, and she suffered from mania and severe depression for the rest of her life. Patriarchal, repressive Victorian society did not encourage women to attend universities or to participate in intellectual debate. Nonetheless, Woolf began publishing her first essays and reviews after 1904, the year her father died and she and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London. Young students and artists, drawn to the vitality and intellectual curiosity of the Stephen clan, congregated on Thursday evenings to share their views about the world. The Bloomsbury group, as Woolf and her friends came to be call ed, disregarded the constricting taboos of the Victorian era, and such topics as religion, sex, and art

fueled the talk at their weekly salons. They even discussed homosexuality, a subject that shocked many of the groups contemporaries. For Woolf, the gro up served as the undergraduate education that society had denied her. The Voyage Out, Woolfs first novel, was published in 1915, three years after her marriage to Leonard Woolf, a member of the Bloomsbury group. Their partnership furthered the groups intellectual ideals. With Leonard, Woolf founded Hogarth Press, which published Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and other notable authors. She determinedly pursued her own writing as well: During the next few years, Woolf kept a diary and wr ote several novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous essays. She struggled, as she wrote, to both deal with her bouts of bipolarity and to find her true voice as a writer. Before World War I, Woolf viewed the realistic Victorian novel, with its neat and linear plots, as an inadequate form of expression. Her opinion intensified after the war, and in the 1920s she began searching for the form that would reflect the violent contrasts and disjointed impressions of the world around her. In Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, Woolf discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the new realities of postwar England. The novel depicts the subjective experiences and memories of its central characters over a single day in postWorld War I London. Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel's structure highlights the finely interwoven texture of the characters' thoughts. Critics tend to agree that Woolf found her writers voice with this novel. At forty-three, she knew her experimental style was unlikely to be a popular success but no longer felt compelled to seek critical praise. The novel did, however, gain a measure of commercial and critical success. This book, which focuses on commonplace tasks, such as shopping, throwing a party, and eating dinner, showed that no act was too small or too ordinary for a writers attention. Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway transformed the novel as an art form.
Woolf develops the books protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and myriad other characters by chronicling their i nterior thoughts with little pause or explanation, a style referred to as stream of consciousness . Several central characters and more than one hundred minor characters appear in the text, and their thoughts spin out like spider webs. Sometimes the threads of thought crossand people succeed in communicating. More often, however, the threads

do not cross, leaving the characters isolated and alone. Woolf believed that behind the cotton wool of life, as she terms it in her autobiographical collection of essays Moments of Being (1941), and under the downpour of impressions saturating a mind during each moment, a pattern exists. Characters in Mrs. Dalloway occasionally perceive lifes pattern through a sudden shock, or what Woolf called a moment of being. Suddenly the cotton wool parts, and a person sees reality, and his or her place in it, clearly. In the vast catastrophe of the European war, wrote Woolf, our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. These words appear in her essay collection, The Common Reader, which was published just one month before Mrs. Dalloway. Her novel attempts to uncover fragmented emotions, such as desperation or love, in order to find, through moments of being, a way to endure. While writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf reread the Greek classics along with two new modernist writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Woolf shared these writers' interest in time and psychology, and she incorporated these issues into her novel. She wanted to show characters in flux, rather than static, characters who think and emote as they move through space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored actual human experience. Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world wars: the British Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve, was in decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britains colonial rule. At home, the Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the Conservative Party, with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had flooded the workforce to replace the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical institutions. Woolf lent her support to the feminist movement in her nonfiction book A Room of Ones Own (1929), as well as in numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the womens suffrage movement. Although Mrs. Dalloway portrays the shifting political atmosphere through the characters Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and Hugh Whitbread, it focuses more deeply on the charged social mood through the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf delves into the consciousness of Clarissa, a woman who exists largely

in the domestic sphere, to ensure that readers take her character seriously, rather than simply dismiss her as a vain and uneducated upper-class wife. In spite of her heroic and imperfect effort in life, Clarissa, like every human being and even the old social order itself, must face death. Woolfs struggles with mental illness gave her an opportunity to witness firsthand how insensitive medical professionals could be, and she critiques their tactlessness in Mrs. Dalloway. One of Woolfs doctors suggested that plenty of rest and rich food would lead to a full recovery, a cure prescribed in the novel, and another removed several of her teeth. In the early twentieth century, mental health problems were too often considered imaginary, an embarrassment, or the product of moral weakness. During one bout of illness, Woolf heard birds sing like Greek choruses and King Edward use foul language among some azaleas . In 1941, as England entered a second world war, and at the onset of another breakdown she feared would be permanent, Woolf placed a large stone in her pocket to weigh herself down and drowned herself in the River Ouse. Plot Overview

M rs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one womans life. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, walks through her London neighborhood to prepare for the party she will host that evening. When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house unexpectedly. The two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the present intertwines with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peters marriage proposal, and Peter has never quite gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband, Richard, but before she can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room. Peter leaves and goes to Regents Park. He thinks about Clarissas refusal, which still obsesses him. The point of view then shifts to Septimus, a veteran of World War I who was injured in trench warfare and now suffers from shell shock. Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, pass time in Regents Park. They are waiting for Septimuss appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, a celebrated psychiatrist. Before the war, Septimus was a budding young poet and lover of Sh akespeare; when the war broke out, he enlisted immediately for romantic patriotic reasons.

He became numb to the horrors of war and its aftermath: when his friend Evans died, he felt little sadness. Now Septimus sees nothing of worth in the England he fought for, and he has lost the desire to preserve either his society or himself. Suicidal, he believes his lack of feeling is a crime. Clearly Septimuss experiences in the war have permanently scarred him, and he has serious mental problems. However, Sir William does not listen to what Septimus says and diagnoses a lack of proportion. Sir William plans to separate Septimus from Lucrezia and send him to a mental institution in the country. Richard Dalloway eats lunch with Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton, mem bers of high society. The men help Lady Bruton write a letter to the Times, London's largest newspaper. After lunch, Richard returns home to Clarissa with a large bunch of roses. He intends to tell her that he loves her but finds that he cannot, because it has been so long since he last said it. Clarissa considers the void that exists between people, even between husband and wife. Even though she values the privacy she is able to maintain in her marriage, considering it vital to the success of the relationship, at the same time she finds slightly disturbing the fact that Richard doesnt know everything about her. Clarissa sees off Elizabeth and her history teacher, Miss Kilman, who are going shopping. The two older women despise one another passionately, eac h believing the other to be an oppressive force over Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Septimus and Lucrezia are in their apartment, enjoying a moment of happiness together before the men come to take Septimus to the asylum. One of Septimuss doctors, Dr. Holmes, arrives, and Septimus fears the doctor will destroy his soul. In order to avoid this fate, he jumps from a window to his death. Peter hears the ambulance go by to pick up Septimuss body and marvels ironically at the level of Londons civilization. He goes to Clarissas party, where most of the novels major characters are assembled. Clarissa works hard to make her party a success but feels dissatisfied by her own role and acutely conscious of Peters critical eye. All the partygoers, but especially Peter and Sally Seton, have, to some degree, failed to accomplish the dreams of their youth. Though the social order is undoubtedly changing, Elizabeth and the members of her generation will probably repeat the errors of Clarissas generation. Sir William Bradshaw arrives late, and his wife explains that one of his patients, the young veteran (Septimus), has committed suicide. Clarissa retreats to the privacy of a small room to consider Septimuss death. She understands that he was overwhelmed by life and that men li ke Sir William

make life intolerable. She identifies with Septimus, admiring him for having taken the plunge and for not compromising his soul. She feels, with her comfortable position as a society hostess, responsible for his death. The party nears its close as guests begin to leave. Clarissa enters the room, and her presence fills Peter with a great excitement.
hemes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Communication vs. Privacy Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and others struggle to find outlets for communication as well as adequate privacy, and the balance between the two is difficult for all to attain. Clarissa in particular struggles to open the pathway for communication and throws parties in an attempt to draw people together. At the same time, she feels shrouded within her own reflective soul and thinks the ultimate human mystery is how she can exist in one room while the old woman in the house across from hers exists in another. Even as Clarissa celebrates the old womans independence, she knows it comes with an inevitable loneliness. Peter tries to explain the contradictory human impulses toward privacy and communication by comparing the soul to a fish that swims along in murky water, then rises quickly to the surface to frolic on the waves. The war has changed peoples ideas of what English society should be, and understanding is difficult between those who support traditional English society and those who hope for continued change. Meaningful connections in this disjointed postwar world are not easy to make, no matter what efforts the characters put forth. Ultimately, Clarissa sees Septimuss death as a desperate, but legitimate, act of communication. Disillusionment with the British Empire Throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire seemed invincible. It expanded into many other countries, such as India, Nigeria, and South Africa, becoming the largest empire the world had ever seen. World War I w as a violent reality check. For the first time in nearly a century, the English were vulnerable on their own land. The Allies technically won the war, but the extent of

devastation England suffered made it a victory in name only. Entire communities of young men were injured and killed. In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, England suffered 60,000 casualtiesthe largest slaughter in Englands history. Not surprisingly, English citizens lost much of their faith in the empire after the war. No longer could Engl and claim to be invulnerable and all powerful. Citizens were less inclined to willingly adhere to the rigid constraints imposed by Englands class system, which benefited only a small margin of society but which all classes had fought to preserve. In 1923, when Mrs. Dalloway takes place, the old establishment and its oppressive values are nearing their end. English citizens, including Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, feel the failure of the empire as strongly as they feel their own personal failures. Those citizens who still champion English tradition, such as Aunt Helena and Lady Bruton, are old. Aunt Helena, with her glass eye (perhaps a symbol of her inability or unwillingness to see the empire's disintegration), is turning into an artifact. Anticipating the end of the Conservative Partys reign, Richard plans to write the history of the great British military family, the Brutons, who are already part of the past. The old empire faces an imminent demise, and the loss of the traditional and familiar social order leaves the English at loose ends. The Fear of Death Thoughts of death lurk constantly beneath the surface of everyday life in Mrs. Dalloway, especially for Clarissa, Septimus, and Peter, and this awareness makes even mundane events and interactions meaningful, sometimes even threatening. At the very start of her day, when she goes out to buy flowers for her party, Clarissa remembers a moment in her youth when she suspected a terrible event would occur. Big Ben tolls out the hour, and Clarissa repeats a line from Shakespeares Cymbeline over and over as the day goes on: Fear no more the heat o the sun / Nor the furious winters rages. The line is from a funeral song that celebrates death as a comfort after a difficult life. Middle -aged Clarissa has experienced the deaths of her father, mother, and sister and has lived through the calamity of war, and she has grown to believe that living even one day is dangerous. Death is very naturally in her thoughts, and the line from Cymbeline, along with Septimuss suicidal embrace of death, ultimately helps her to be at peace with her own mortality. Peter Walsh, so insecure in his identity, grows frantic at the idea of death and follows an anonymous young

woman through London to forget about it. Septimus faces death most directly. Though he fears it, he finally chooses it over what seems to him a direr alternativeliving another day. The Threat of Oppression Oppression is a constant threat for Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, and Septimus dies in order to escape what he perceives to be an oppressive social pressure to conform. It comes in many guises, including religion, science, or social convention. Miss Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw are two of the major oppressors in the novel: Miss Kilman dreams of felling Clarissa in the name of religion, and Sir William would like to subdue all those who challenge his conception of the world. Both wish to convert the world to their belief systems in order to gain power and dominate others, and their rigidity oppresses all who come into contact with them. More subtle oppressors, even those who do not intend to, do harm by supporting the repressive English social system. Though Clarissa herself lives under the weight of that system and often feels oppressed by it, her acceptance of patriarchal English society makes her, in part, responsible for Septimuss death. Thus she too is an oppressor of sorts. At the end of the novel, she reflects on his suicide: Somehow it was her disaster her disgrace. She accepts responsibility, though other characters are equally or more fully to blame, which suggests that everyone is in some way complicit in the oppression of others. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes. Time Time imparts order to the fluid thoughts, memories, and encounters that make up Mrs. Dalloway. Big Ben, a symbol of England and its might, sounds out the hour relentlessly, ensuring that the passage of time, and the awareness of eventual death, is always palpable. Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and other characters are in the grip of time, and as they age they evaluate how they have spent their lives. Clarissa, in particular, senses the passage of time, and the appearance of Sally and Peter, friends from the past, emphasizes how much time has gone by since Clarissa was young. Once the hour chimes, however, the sound disappearsits leaden circles dissolved in the air. This expression

recurs many times throughout the novel, indicating how ephemeral time is, despite the pomp of Big Ben and despite peoples wary obsession with it. It is time, Rezia says to Septimus as they sit in the park waiting for the doctor's appointment on Harley Street. The ancient woman at the Regents Park Tube station suggests that the human condition knows no boundaries of time, since she continues to sing the same song for what seems like eternity. She understands that life is circular, not merely linear, which is the only sort of time that Big Ben tracks. Time is so important to the themes, structure, and characters of this novel that Woolf almost named her book The Hours. Shakespeare The many appearances of Shakes peare specifically and poetry in general suggest hopefulness, the possibility of finding comfort in art, and the survival of the soul in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa quotes Shakespeares plays many times throughout the day. When she shops for flowers at the beginning of the novel, she reads a few lines from a Shakespeare play, Cymbeline, in a book displayed in a shop window. The lines come from a funeral hymn in the play that suggests death should be embraced as a release from the constraints of life. Since Clarissa fears death for much of the novel, these lines suggest that an alternative, hopeful way of addressing the prospect of death exists. Clarissa also identifies with the title character in Othello, who loves his wife but kills her out of jealousy, then kills himself when he learns his jealousy was unwarranted. Clarissa shares with Othello the sense of having lost a love, especially when she thinks about Sally Seton. Before the war, Septimus appreciated Shakespeare as well, going so far as aspiring to be a poet. He no longer finds comfort in poetry after he returns. The presence of an appreciation for poetry reveals much about Clarissa and Septimus, just as the absence of such appreciation reveals much about the characters who differ from them, such as Richard Dalloway and Lady Bruton. Richard finds Shakespeares sonnets indecent, and he compares reading them to listening in at a keyhole. Not surprisingly, Richard himself has a difficult time voicing his emotions. Lady Bruton never reads poetry either, and he r demeanor is so rigid and impersonal that she has a reputation of caring more for politics than for people. Traditional English society promotes a suppression of visible emotion, and since Shakespeare and poetry promote a discussion of feeling and

emotion, they belong to sensitive people like Clarissa, who are in many ways antiestablishment. Trees and Flowers Tree and flower images abound in Mrs. Dalloway. The color, variety, and beauty of flowers suggest feeling and emotion, and those characters who are comfortable with flowers, such as Clarissa, have distinctly different personalities than those characters who are not, such as Richard and Lady Bruton. The first time we see Clarissa, a deep thinker, she is on her way to the flower shop, where she will revel in the flowers she sees. Richard and Hugh, more emotionally repressed representatives of the English establishment, offer traditional roses and carnations to Clarissa and Lady Bruton, respectively. Richard handles the bouquet of roses awkwardly, like a weapon. Lady Bruton accepts the flowers with a grim smile and lays them stiffly by her plate, also unsure of how to handle them. When she eventually stuffs them into her dress, the femininity and grace of the gesture are rare and unexpected. Trees, with their extensive root systems, suggest the vast reach of the human soul, and Clarissa and Septimus, who both struggle to protect their souls, revere them. Clarissa believes souls survive in trees after death, and Septimus, who has turned his back on patriar chal society, feels that cutting down a tree is the equivalent of committing murder. Waves and Water Waves and water regularly wash over events and thoughts in Mrs. Dalloway and nearly always suggest the possibility of extinction or death. While Clarissa mends her party dress, she thinks about the peaceful cycle of waves collecting and falling on a summer day, when the world itself seems to say that is all. Time sometimes takes on waterlike qualities for Clarissa, such as when the chime from Big Ben flood[s] her room, marking another passing hour. Rezia, in a rare moment of happiness with Septimus after he has helped her construct a hat, lets her words trail off like a contented tap left running. Even then, she knows that stream of contentedness will dry up eventually. The narrative structure of the novel itself also suggests fluidity. One characters thoughts appear, intensify, then fade into anothers, much like waves that collect then fall.

Traditional English society itself is a kind of tide, pull ing under those people not strong enough to stand on their own. Lady Bradshaw, for example, eventually succumbs to Sir Williams bullying, overbearing presence. The narrator says she had gone under, that her will became water -logged and eventually sank into his. Septimus is also sucked under societys pressures. Earlier in the day, before he kills himself, he looks out the window and sees everything as though it is underwater. Trees drag their branches through the air as though dragging them through water, the light outside is watery gold, and his hand on the sofa reminds him of floating in seawater. While Septimus ultimately cannot accept or function in society, Clarissa manages to navigate it successfully. Peter sees Clarissa in a silver-green mermaids dress at her party, [l]olloping on the waves. Between her mermaids dress and her ease in bobbing through her party guests, Clarissa succeeds in staying afloat. However, she identifies with Septimuss wish to fight the cycle and go under, even if s he will not succumb to the temptation herself. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Prime Minister The prime minister in Mrs. Dalloway embodies Englands old values and hierarchical social system, which are in decline. When Peter Walsh wants to insult Clarissa and suggest she will sell out and become a society hostess, he says she will marry a prime minister. When Lady Bruton, a champion of English tradition, wants to compliment Hugh, she calls him My Prime Minister. The prime minister is a figure from the old establishment, which Clarissa and Septimus are struggling against. Mrs. Dalloway takes place after World War I, a time when the English looked desperately for meaning in the ol d symbols but found the symbols hollow. When the conservative prime minister finally arrives at Clarissas party, his appearance is unimpressive. The old pyramidal social system that benefited the very rich before the war is now decaying, and the symbols of its greatness have become pathetic. Peter Walshs Pocketknife and Other Weapons Peter Walsh plays constantly with his pocketknife, and the opening, closing, and fiddling with the knife suggest his flightiness and inability to make decisions.

He cannot decide what he feels and doesnt know whether he abhors English tradition and wants to fight it, or whether he accepts English civilization just as it is. The pocketknife reveals Peters defensiveness. He is armed with the knife, in a sense, when he pays an unexpected visit to Clarissa, while she herself is armed with her sewing scissors. Their weapons make them equal competitors. Knives and weapons are also phallic symbols, hinting at sexuality and power. Peter cannot define his own identity, and his consta nt fidgeting with the knife suggests how uncomfortable he is with his masculinity. Characters fall into two groups: those who are armed and those who are not. Ellie Henderson, for example, is weaponless, because she is poor and has not been trained for a ny career. Her ambiguous relationship with her friend Edith also puts her at a disadvantage in society, leaving her even less able to defend herself. Septimus, psychologically crippled by the literal weapons of war, commits suicide by impaling himself on a metal fence, showing the danger lurking behind man made boundaries. The Old Woman in the Window The old woman in the window across from Clarissas house represents the privacy of the soul and the loneliness that goes with it, both of which will increase as Clarissa grows older. Clarissa sees the future in the old woman: She herself will grow old and become more and more alone, since that is the nature of life. As Clarissa grows older, she reflects more but communicates less. Instead, she keeps her feelings locked inside the private rooms of her own soul, just as the old woman rattles alone around the rooms of her house. Nevertheless, the old woman also represents serenity and the purity of the soul. Clarissa respects the womans private reflections and thi nks beauty lies in this act of preserving ones interior life and independence. Before Septimus jumps out the window, he sees an old man descending the staircase outside, and this old man is a parallel figure to the old woman. Though Clarissa and Septimus ultimately choose to preserve their private lives in opposite ways, their view of loneliness, privacy, and communication resonates within these similar images. The Old Woman Singing an Ancient Song Opposite the Regents Park Tube station, an old woman sings an ancient song that celebrates life, endurance, and continuity. She is oblivious to everyone around her as she sings, beyond caring what the world thinks. The narrator

explains that no matter what happens in the world, the old woman will still be there, even in ten million years, and that the song has soaked through the knotted roots of infinite ages. Roots, intertwined and hidden beneath the earth, suggest the deepest parts of peoples souls, and this womans song touches everyone who hears it in some way. Peter hears the song first and compares the old woman to a rusty pump. He doesnt catch her triumphant message and feels only pity for her, giving her a coin before stepping into a taxi. Rezia, however, finds strength in the old womans words, and the song makes her feel as though all will be okay in her life. Women in the novel, who have to view patriarchal English society from the outside, are generally more attuned to nature and the messages of voices outside the mainstream. Rezia, therefore, is able to see the old woman for the life force she is, instead of simply a nuisance or a tragic figure to be dealt with, ignored, or pitied.

Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels. Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. [1]
[edit] Plot summary

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes

her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton for whom she felt sexual feelings. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning, having returned from India that day. Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I suffering from deferred traumatic stress, spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where they are observed by Peter Walsh. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window. Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire the act of this stranger, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness. Woolf's original plan for her novel called for Clarissa to kill herself during her party. In this original version, Septimus (whom Woolf called Mrs. Dalloway's "double") did not appear at all. [2]

[edit] Style

In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, except flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It is an example of free indirect discourse storytelling (not stream of consciousness because this story moves between the consciousnesses of every character in a form of discourse): every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior narration follows at least twenty characters in this way but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often considered

one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century (though Woolf herself, writing in 1928, apparently denied this [2]). In her essay 'Modern Fiction', Woolf praised James Joyce's Ulysses, saying of the scene in the cemetery, "on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece". [3] The Hogarth Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, had to turn down the chance to publish the novel in 1919, because of the obscenity law in England, as well as the practical issues regarding publishing such a substantial text. Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs Dalloway while still working on the novel. A year before its publication, she gave a talk at Cambridge University called "Character in Fiction," revised and retitled later that year as "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." [4]
[edit] Themes [edit] Mental illness

Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression.[5] Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus' decline and suicide; his doctors make snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly through his wife and dismiss his urgent confessions before he can make them. Dr. Holmes remarks that Septimus "was not ill. Dr Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him". [6] Woolf goes beyond criticizing the treatment of mental illness. Using the characters of Clarissa and Rezia, she makes the argument that people can only interpret Septimus' shell-shock according to their cultural norms. [7] Throughout the course of the novel Clarissa does not meet Septimus. Clarissa's reality is vastly different from that of Septimus; his presence in London is unknown to Clarissa until his death becomes idle chat at her party. By never having these characters meet, Woolf is suggesting that mental illness can be contained to the individuals who suffer from it without others who remain unaffected ever having to witness it. [8] This allows Woolf to weave her criticism of the treatment of the mentally ill with her larger argument, which is the criticism of society's class structure. Her use of Septimus as the stereotypically traumatized man from the war is her way to show that there were still reminders of the First World War in 1923 London.[7] These ripples affect Mrs. Dalloway and readers spanning generations. Shell shock or post traumatic stress disorder is an

important addition to the early 20th century canon of post -war British Literature. [9] There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's struggles with bipolar disorder (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus does). [5] Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.
[edit] Existential issues

When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts rather than concrete events in a person's life. Most of the plot in Mrs Dalloway is realization that the characters subjectively make. [5] Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her c harm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence "There she was." She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life and her mood remains light even though she hears about it in the midst of the party.
[edit] Feminism

As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies sexual and economic repression and the narcissism of bourgeois women who have never known the hunger and insecurity of working women. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a patrician politician but she is still able to express herself and find distinction in the parties she throws. [5] Her old friend Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman:[5] She smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her i n the present day, she turns out

to be a perfect housewife, having married a self -made rich man and given birth to five sons.
[edit] Homosexuality

Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton 34 years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel" (from "Mrs Dalloway", Penguin Popular Classics 1996, page 36 OR Harcourt, Inc. (2005), Page 35) but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality. Similarly, Septimus is haunted by the image of his dear friend Evans. Evans, his commanding officer, is described as being "undemonstrat ive in the company of women". Woolf describes Septimus and Evans behaving together like "two dogs playing on a hearth-rug" who, inseparable, "had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other..." Jean E. Kennard notes that the word "share" could easily be read in a Forsteran manner, perhaps as in Forster's Maurice which shows the word's use in this period to describe homosexual relations. Kennard is one to note Septimus' "increas ing revulsion at the idea of heterosexual sex", abstaining from sex with Rezia and feeling that "the business of copulation was filth to him before the end." [10]

5. JAMES JOYCE
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in the town of Rathgar, near Dublin, Ireland. He was the oldest of ten children born to a well -meaning but financially inept father and a solemn, pious mother. Joyce's parents managed to scrape together enough money t o send their talented son to the Clongowes Wood College, a prestigious boarding school, and then to Belvedere College, where Joyce excelled as an actor and writer. Later, he attended University College in Dublin, where he became increasingly committed to l anguage and literature as a champion of Modernism. In 1902, Joyce left the university and moved to Paris, but briefly returned to Ireland in 1903 upon the death of his mother. Shortly

after his mother's death, Joyce began work on the story that would later become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Published in serial form in 19141915, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws on many details from Joyce's early life. The novel's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways Joyce's fictional doubleJoyce had even published stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus" before writing the novel. Like Joyce himself, Stephen is the son of an impoverished father and a highly devout Catholic mother. Also like Joy ce, he attends Clongowes Wood, Belvedere, and University Colleges, struggling with questions of faith and nationality before leaving Ireland to make his own way as an artist. Many of the scenes in the novel are fictional, but some of its most powerful moments are autobiogphical: both the Christmas dinner scene and Stephen's first sexual experience with the Dublin prostitute closely resemble actual events in Joyce's life. In addition to drawing heavily on Joyce's personal life, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also makes a number of references to the politics and religion of early-twentieth-century Ireland. When Joyce was growing up, Ireland had been under British rule since the sixteenth century, and tensions between Ireland and Britain had been espec ially high since the potato blight of 1845. In addition to political strife, there was considerable religious tension: the majority of Irish, including the Joyces, were Catholics, and strongly favored Irish independence. The Protestant minority, on the other hand, mostly wished to remain united with Britain.

Around the time Joyce was born, the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell was spearheading the movement for Irish independence. In 1890, however, Parnell's longstanding affair with a married woman was exposed, leading the Catholic Church to condemn him and causing many of his former followers to turn against him. Many Irish nationalists blamed Parnell's death, which occurred only a year later, on the Catholic Church. Indeed, we see these strong opini ons about Parnell surface in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man during an emotional Christmas dinner argument among members of the Dedalus family. By 1900, the Irish people felt largely united in demanding freedom from British rule. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen's friends at University College frequently confront him with political questions about this struggle between Ireland and England.

After completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Zurich in 1915, Joyce returned to Paris, where he wrote two more major novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, over the course of the next several years. These three novels, along with a short story collection, Dubliners, form the core of his remarkable literary career. He died in 1941.
Today, Joyce is celebrated as one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century. He was one of the first writers to make extensive and convincing use of stream of consciousness, a stylistic form in which written prose seeks to represent the characters' stream of inner thoughts and perceptions rather than render these characters from an objective, external perspective. This technique, used in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man mostly during the opening sections and in Chapter 5, sometimes makes for difficult reading. With effort, however, the seemingly jumbled perceptions of stream of consciousness can crystallize into a coherent and sophisticated portrayal of a character's experience . Another stylistic technique for which Joyce is noted is the epiphany, a moment in which a character makes a sudden, profound realization whether prompted by an external object or a voice from within that creates a change in his or her perception of the world. Joyce uses epiphany most notably in Dubliners, but A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is full of these sudden moments of spiritual revelation as well. Most notable is a scene in which Stephen sees a young girl wading at the beach, which strikes him with the sudden realization that an appreciation for beauty can be truly good. This moment is a classic example of Joyce's belief that an epiphany can dramatically alter the human spirit in a matter of just a few seconds. Plot Overview

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, as he gradually decides to cast off all his social, familial, and religious constraints to live a life devoted to the art of writing. As a young boy, Stephen's Catholic faith and Irish nationality heavily influence him. He attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. At first, Stephen is lonely and homesick at the school, but as time passes he finds his place among the other boys. He enjoys his visits home, even though family tensions run high after the death of the Irish

political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. This sensitive subject becomes the topic of a furious, politically charged argument over the family's Christmas dinner. Stephen's father, Simon, is inept with money, and the family sinks deeper and deeper into debt. After a summer spent in the company of his Uncle Charles, Stephen learns that the family cannot afford to send him back to Clongowes , and that they will instead move to Dublin. Stephen starts attending a prestigious day school called Belvedere, where he grows to excel as a writer and as an actor in the student theater. His first sexual experience, with a young Dublin prostitute, unleashes a storm of guilt and shame in Stephen, as he tries to reconcile his physical desires with the stern Catholic morality of his surroundings. For a while, he ignores his religious upbringing, throwing himself with debauched abandon into a variety of sins masturbation, gluttony, and more visits to prostitutes, among others. Then, on a three-day religious retreat, Stephen hears a trio of fiery sermons about sin, judgment, and hell. Deeply shaken, the young man resolves to rededicate himself to a life of Chri stian piety. Stephen begins attending Mass every day, becoming a model of Catholic piety, abstinence, and self -denial. His religious devotion is so pronounced that the director of his school asks him to consider entering the priesthood. After briefly considering the offer, Stephen realizes that the austerity of the priestly life is utterly incompatible with his love for sensual beauty. That day, Stephen learns from his sister that the family will be moving, once again for financial reasons. Anxiously awaiting news about his acceptance to the university, Stephen goes for a walk on the beach, where he observes a young girl wading in the tide. He is struck by her beauty, and realizes, in a moment of epiphany, that the love and desire of beauty should not be a source of shame. Stephen resolves to live his life to the fullest, and vows not to be constrained by the boundaries of his family, his nation, and his religion. Stephen moves on to the university, where he develops a number of strong friendships, and is especially close with a young man named Cranly. In a series of conversations with his companions, Stephen works to formulate his theories about art. While he is dependent on his friends as listeners, he is also determined to create an independent existence, l iberated from the expectations of friends and family. He becomes more and more determined to free himself from all limiting pressures, and eventually decides to leave Ireland to escape

them. Like his namesake, the mythical Daedalus, Stephen hopes to build himself wings on which he can fly above all obstacles and achieve a life as an artist.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Themes The Development of Individual Consciousness Perhaps the most famous aspect of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's innovative use of stream of consciousness, a style in which the author directly transcribes the thoughts and sensations that go through a character's mind, rather than simply describing those sensations from the external standpoint of an observer. Joyce's use of stream of consciousness makes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a story of the development of Stephen's mind. In the first chapter, the very young Stephen is only capable of describing his world in simple words and phrases. The sensations that he experiences are all jumbled together with a child's lack of attention to cause and effect. Later, when Stephen is a teenager obsessed with religion, he is able to thin k in a clearer, more adult manner. Paragraphs are more logically ordered than in the opening sections of the novel, and thoughts progress logically. Stephen's mind is more mature and he is now more coherently aware of his surroundings. Nonetheless, he still trusts blindly in the church, and his passionate emotions of guilt and religious ecstasy are so strong that they get in the way of rational thought. It is only in the final chapter, when Stephen is in the university, that he seems truly rational. By the end of the novel, Joyce renders a portrait of a mind that has achieved emotional, intellectual, and artistic adulthood. The development of Stephen's consciousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is particularly interesting because, insofar as St ephen is a portrait of Joyce himself, Stephen's development gives us insight into the development of a literary genius. Stephen's experiences hint at the influences that transformed Joyce himself into the great writer he is considered today: Stephen's obse ssion with language; his strained relations with religion, family, and culture; and his dedication to forging an aesthetic of his own mirror the ways in which Joyce

related to the various tensions in his life during his formative years. In the last chapter of the novel, we also learn that genius, though in many ways a calling, also requires great work and considerable sacrifice. Watching Stephen's daily struggle to puzzle out his aesthetic philosophy, we get a sense of the great task that awaits him. The Pitfalls of Religious Extremism Brought up in a devout Catholic family, Stephen initially ascribes to an absolute belief in the morals of the church. As a teenager, this belief leads him to two opposite extremes, both of which are harmful. At first, he falls into the extreme of sin, repeatedly sleeping with prostitutes and deliberately turning his back on religion. Though Stephen sins willfully, he is always aware that he acts in violation of the church's rules. Then, when Father Arnall's speech prompts him to return to Catholicism, he bounces to the other extreme, becoming a perfect, near fanatical model of religious devotion and obedience. Eventually, however, Stephen realizes that both of these lifestyles the completely sinful and the completely devout are extremes that have been false and harmful. He does not want to lead a completely debauched life, but also rejects austere Catholicism because he feels that it does not permit him the full experience of being human. Stephen ultimately reaches a decision to embrace life and celebrate humanity after seeing a young girl wading at a beach. To him, the girl is a symbol of pure goodness and of life lived to the fullest. The Role of the Artist A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explores what it means to become an artist. Stephen's decision at the end of the novel to leave his family and friends behind and go into exile in order to become an artist suggests that Joyce sees the artist as a necessarily isolated figure. In his decision, Stephen turns his back on his community, refusing to accept the constraints of political involvement, religious devotion, and family commitment that the community places on its members. However, though the artist is an isolated figure, Stephen's ultimate goal is to give a voice to the very community that he is leaving. In the last few lines of the novel, Stephen expresses his desire to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." He recognizes that his community will always be a part of him, as it has created and shaped his identity. When he

creatively expresses his own ideas, he will also convey the voice of his entire community. Even as Stephen turns his back on the traditional forms of participation and membership in a community, he envisions his writing as a service to the community. The Need for Irish Autonomy Despite his desire to steer clear of politics, Stephen constantly ponders Ireland's place in the world. He concludes that the Irish have always been a subservient people, allowing outsiders to control them. In his conversation with the dean of studies at the university, he realizes that even the language of the Irish people really belongs to the English. Stephen's perception of Ireland's subservience has two effects on his development as an artist. First, it makes him determined to escape the bonds that his Irish ancestors have accepted. As we see in his conversation with Davin, Stephen feels an anxious need to emerge from his Irish heritage as his own person, free from the shackles that have traditiona lly confined his country: "Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made?" Second, Stephen's perception makes him determined to use his art to reclaim autonomy for Ireland. Using the borrowed language of English, he plans to write in a style that will be both autonomous from England and true to the Irish people. Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes. Motifs Music Music, especially singing, appear s repeatedly throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen's appreciation of music is closely tied to his love for the sounds of language. As a very young child, he turns Dante's threats into a song, " [A]pologise, pull out his eyes, pull out his eyes, apologise." Singing is more than just language, however it is language transformed by vibrant humanity. Indeed, music appeals to the part of Stephen that wants to live life to the fullest. We see this aspect of music near the end of the novel, w hen Stephen suddenly feels at peace upon hearing a woman singing. Her voice prompts him to recall his resolution to leave Ireland and become a writer, reinforcing his determination to celebrate life through writing.

Flight Stephen Dedalus's very name embod ies the idea of flight. Stephen's namesake, Daedalus, is a figure from Greek mythology, a renowned craftsman who designs the famed Labyrinth of Crete for King Minos. Minos keeps Daedalus and his son Icarus imprisoned on Crete, but Daedalus makes plans to e scape by using feathers, twine, and wax to fashion a set of wings for himself and his son. Daedalus escapes successfully, but Icarus flies too high. The sun's heat melts the wax holding Icarus's wings together, and he plummets to his death in the sea. In the context of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we can see Stephen as representative of both Daedalus and Icarus, as Stephen's father also has the last name of Dedalus. With this mythological reference, Joyce implies that Stephen must always balance his desire to flee Ireland with the danger of overestimating his own abilitiesthe intellectual equivalent of Icarus's flight too close to the sun. To diminish the dangers of attempting too much too soon, Stephen bides his time at the university, developing his aesthetic theory fully before attempting to leave Ireland and write seriously. The birds that appear to Stephen in the third section of Chapter 5 signal that it is finally time for Stephen, now fully formed as an artist, to take flight himself. Prayers, Secular Songs, and Latin Phrases We can often tell Stephen's state of mind by looking at the fragments of prayers, songs, and Latin phrases that Joyce inserts into the text. When Stephen is a schoolboy, Joyce includes childish, sincere prayers that mi rror the manner in which a child might devoutly believe in the church, even without understanding the meaning of its religious doctrine. When Stephen prays in church despite the fact that he has committed a mortal sin, Joyce transcribes a long passage of t he Latin prayer, but it is clear that Stephen merely speaks the words without believing them. Then, when Stephen is at the university, Latin is used as a jokehis friends translate colloquial phrases like "peace over the whole bloody globe" into Latin because they find the academic sound of the translation amusing. This jocular use of Latin mocks both the young men's education and the stern, serious manner in which Latin is used in the church. These linguistic jokes demonstrate that Stephen is no longer ser ious about religion. Finally, Joyce includes a few lines from the Irish folk song "Rosie O'Grady" near the end of the novel. These simple lines reflect the peaceful feeling that the song

brings to Stephen and Cranly, as well as the traditional Irish cultur e that Stephen plans to leave behind. Throughout the novel, such prayers, songs, and phrases form the background of Stephen's life. Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Symbols Green and Maroon Stephen associates the colors green and maroon with his governess, Dante, and with two leaders of the Irish resistance, Charles Parnell and Michael Davitt. In a dream after Parnell's death, Stephen sees Dante dressed in green and maroon as the Irish people mourn their fallen leader. This vision indicates that Stephen associates the two colors with the way Irish politics are played out among the members of his own family. Emma Emma appears only in glimpses throughout most of Stephen's young life, and he never gets to know her as a person. Instead, she becomes a symbol of pure love, untainted by sexuality or reality. Stephen worships Emma as the ideal of feminine purity. When he goes through his devoutly religious phase, he imagines his reward for his piety as a union with Emma in heaven. It is only later, when he is at the university, that we finally see a real conversation between Stephen and Emma. Stephen's diary entry regarding this conversation portrays Emma as a real, friendly, and somewhat ordinary girl, but certainly not the goddess Stephen earlier makes her out to be. This more balanced view of Emma mirrors Stephen's abandonment of the extremes of complete sin and complete devotion in favor of a middle path, the devotion to the appreciation of beauty.

6. WILLIAM GOLDING
Context

W illiam golding was born on September 19, 1911, in Cornwall, England. Although he tried to write a novel as early as age twelve, his parents urged him

to study the natural sciences. Golding followed his parents wishes until his second year at Oxford, when he changed his focus to English literature. After graduating from Oxford, he worked briefly as a theater actor and director, wrote poetry, and then became a schoolteacher. In 1940, a year after England entered World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy, where he served in command of a rocket-launcher and participated in the invasion of Normandy.

Goldings experience in World War II had a profound effect on his view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable. After the w ar, Golding resumed teaching and started to write novels. His first and greatest success came with Lord of the Flies (1954), which ultimately became a bestseller in both Britain and the United States after more than twenty publishers rejected it. The novel s sales enabled Golding to retire from teaching and devote himself fully to writing. Golding wrote several more novels, notably Pincher Martin (1956), and a play, The Brass Butterfly (1958). Although he never matched the popular and critical success he enjoyed with Lord of the Flies, he remained a respected and distinguished author for the rest of his life and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Golding died in 1993, one of the most acclaimed writers of the second half of the twentieth cent ury. Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war. Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based on Goldings experience with the real-life violence and brutality of World War II. Free from the rules and structures of civilization and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend into savagery. As the boys splinter into factions, some behave peace fully and work together to maintain order and achieve common goals, while others rebel and seek only anarchy and violence. In his portrayal of the small world of the island, Golding paints a broader portrait of the fundamental human struggle between the ci vilizing instinctthe impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and act lawfully and the savage instinctthe impulse to seek brute power over others, act selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence. Golding employs a relatively straightforward writing style in Lord of the Flies, one that avoids highly poetic language, lengthy description, and philosophical

interludes. Much of the novel is allegorical, meaning that the characters and objects in the novel are infused with symbolic significance that co nveys the novels central themes and ideas. In portraying the various ways in which the boys on the island adapt to their new surroundings and react to their new freedom, Golding explores the broad spectrum of ways in which humans respond to stress, change, and tension. Readers and critics have interpreted Lord of the Flies in widely varying ways over the years since its publication. During the 1950s and 1960s, many readings of the novel claimed that Lord of the Flies dramatizes the history of civilization. Some believed that the novel explores fundamental religious issues, such as original sin and the nature of good and evil. Others approached Lord of the Flies through the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who taught that the human mind was the site of a constant battle among different impulses the id (instinctual needs and desires), the ego (the conscious, rational mind), and the superego (the sense of conscience and morality). Still others maintained that Golding wrote the novel as a criticism of the political and social institutions of the West. Ultimately, there is some validity to each of these different readings and interpretations of Lord of the Flies. Although Goldings story is confined to the microcosm of a group of boys, it resounds with implications far beyond the bounds of the small island and explores problems and questions universal to the human experience.
Plot Overview

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

Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggys eyeglasses. However,

the boys pay more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire , and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to death. At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups and spend much of their time splashing in the water and playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting. When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal firewhich had been the hunters responsibility to maintainhas burned out. Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech intended to restore order. At the meeting, it quickly becomes clear that some of the boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys, known as littluns, have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally, asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the seaa proposition that terrifies the entire group. Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage in a battle high above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice the flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on the signal-fire mountain, dead. Sam and Eric, the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and hear the strang e flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has attacked them. The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at od ds, travel up the mountain. They see the silhouette of the parachute from a distance and think that it looks like a huge,

deformed ape. The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey, but before they have finished the task, most of them have slipped away to join Jack. Jack declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters and organizes a hunt and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the occasion. The hunters then decapitate the sow and place its head on a sharpened stake in the jungle as an offering to the beast. Later, encountering the bloody, fly -covered head, Simon has a terrible vision, during which it seems to him that the head is speaking. The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the Lord of the Flies, says that Simon will never escape him, for he exists within all men. Simon faints. When he wakes up, he goes to the mountain, where he sees the dead parachutist. Understanding then that the beast does not exist externally but rather within each individual boy, Simon travels to the beach to tell the others what he has seen. But the others are in the midst of a chaotic revelryeven Ralph and Piggy have joined Jacks feast and when they see Simons shadowy figure emerge from the jungle, they fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth. The following morning, Ralph and Piggy discuss what they have done. Jacks hunters attack them and their few followers and steal Pig gys glasses in the process. Ralphs group travels to Jacks stronghold in an attempt to make Jack see reason, but Jack orders Sam and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the ensuing battle, one boy, Roger, rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing Pig gy and shattering the conch shell. Ralph barely manages to escape a torrent of spears. Ralph hides for the rest of the night and the following day, while the others hunt him like an animal. Jack has the other boys ignite the forest in order to smoke Ralph out of his hiding place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and destroys the sows head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach, where he knows the other boys will soon arrive to kill him. Ralph collapses in exhaustion, but when he looks up, he sees a British naval officer standing over him. The officers ship noticed the fire raging in the jungle. The other boys

reach the beach and stop in their tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at the spectacle of this group of bloodthirsty, savage children, the officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is overwhelmed by the knowledge that he is safe but, thinking about what has happened on the island, he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well. The officer turns his back so that the boy s may regain their composure.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Civilization vs. Savagery The central concern of Lord of the Flies is the conflict between two competing impulses that exist within all human beings: the instinct to live by rules, act peacefully, follow moral commands, and value the good of the group against the instinct to gratify ones immediate desires, act violently to obtain supremacy over others, and enforce ones will. This conflict might be expressed in a number of ways: civilization vs. savagery, order vs. chaos, reason vs. impulse, law vs. anarchy, or the broader heading of good vs. evil. Throughout the novel, Golding associates the instinct of civilization with good and the instinct of savagery with evil.

The conflict between the two instincts is the driving force of the novel, explored through the dissolution of the young English boys civilized, moral, disci plined behavior as they accustom themselves to a wild, brutal, barbaric life in the jungle. Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel, which means that Golding conveys many of his main ideas and themes through symbolic characters and objects. He represents the conflict between civilization and savagery in the conflict between the novels two main characters: Ralph, the protagonist, who represents order and leadership; and Jack, the antagonist, who represents savagery and the desire for power. As the novel progresses, Golding shows how different people feel the influences of the instincts of civilization and savagery to different degrees. Piggy, for

instance, has no savage feelings, while Roger seems barely capable of comprehending the rules of civilization. Generally, however, Golding implies that the instinct of savagery is far more primal and fundamental to the human psyche than the instinct of civilization. Golding sees moral behavior, in many cases, as something that civilization forces upon the individua l rather than a natural expression of human individuality. When left to their own devices, Golding implies, people naturally revert to cruelty, savagery, and barbarism. This idea of innate human evil is central to Lord of the Flies, and finds expression in several important symbols, most notably the beast and the sows head on the stake. Among all the characters, only Simon seems to possess anything like a natural, innate goodness. Loss of Innocence As the boys on the island progress from well-behaved, orderly children longing for rescue to cruel, bloodthirsty hunters who have no desire to return to civilization, they naturally lose the sense of innocence that they possessed at the beginning of the novel. The painted savages in Chapter 12 who have hunted, tortured, and killed animals and human beings are a far cry from the guileless children swimming in the lagoon in Chapter 3. But Golding does not portray this loss of innocence as something that is done to the children; rather, it results naturally from their increasing openness to the innate evil and savagery that has always existed within them. Golding implies that civilization can mitigate but never wipe out the innate evil that exists within all human beings. The forest glade in which Simon sits in Chapter 3 symbolizes this loss of innocence. At first, it is a place of natural beauty and peace, but when Simon returns later in the novel, he discovers the bloody sows head impaled upon a stake in the middle of the clearing. The bloody offering to the beast has disrupted the paradise that existed before a powerful symbol of innate human evil disrupting childhood innocence. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes. Biblical Parallels Many critics have characterized Lord of the Flies as a retelling of episodes from the Bible. While that description may be an oversimplification, the novel does

echo certain Christian images and themes. Golding does not make any explicit or direct connections to Christian symbolism in Lord of the Flies; instead, these biblical parallels function as a kind of subtle motif in the novel, adding thematic resonance to the main ideas of the story. The island itself, particularly Simons glade in the forest, recalls the Garden of Eden in its status as an originally pristine place that is corrupted by the introduction of evil. Similarly, we may see the Lord of the Flies as a representation of the devil, for it works to promote evil among humankind. Furthermore, many critics have drawn strong parallels between Simon and Jesus. Among the boys, Simon is the one who arrives at the moral truth of the novel, and the other boys kill him sacrificially as a consequence of having discovered this truth. Simons co nversation with the Lord of the Flies also parallels the confrontation between Jesus and the devil during Jesus forty days in the wilderness, as told in the Christian Gospels. However, it is important to remember that the parallels between Simon and Christ are not complete, and that there are limits to reading Lord of the Flies purely as a Christian allegory. Save for Simons two uncanny predictions of the future, he lacks the supernatural connection to God that Jesus has in Christian tradition. Although Simon is wise in many ways, his death does not bring salvation to the island; rather, his death plunges the island deeper into savagery and moral guilt. Moreover, Simon dies before he is able to tell the boys the truth he has discovered. Jesus, in contrast, was killed while spreading his moral philosophy. In this way, Simonand Lord of the Flies as a wholeechoes Christian ideas and themes without developing explicit, precise parallels with them. The novels biblical parallels enhance its moral themes but ar e not necessarily the primary key to interpreting the story. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Conch Shell Ralph and Piggy discover the conch shell on the beach at the start of th e novel and use it to summon the boys together after the crash separates them. Used in this capacity, the conch shell becomes a powerful symbol of civilization and order in the novel. The shell effectively governs the boys meetings, for the boy who holds the shell holds the right to speak. In this regard, the shell is more than a symbolit is an actual vessel of political legitimacy and democratic power.

As the island civilization erodes and the boys descend into savagery, the conch shell loses its power and influence among them. Ralph clutches the shell desperately when he talks about his role in murdering Simon. Later, the other boys ignore Ralph and throw stones at him when he attempts to blow the conch in Jacks camp. The boulder that Roger rolls onto Piggy also crushes the conch shell, signifying the demise of the civilized instinct among almost all the boys on the island. Piggys Glasses Piggy is the most intelligent, rational boy in the group, and his glasses represent the power of science and intellectual endeavor in society. This symbolic significance is clear from the start of the novel, when the boys use the lenses from Piggys glasses to focus the sunlight and start a fire. When Jacks hunters raid Ralphs camp and steal the glasses, the savages e ffectively take the power to make fire, leaving Ralphs group helpless. The Signal Fire The signal fire burns on the mountain, and later on the beach, to attract the notice of passing ships that might be able to rescue the boys. As a result, the signal fire becomes a barometer of the boys connection to civilization. In the early parts of the novel, the fact that the boys maintain the fire is a sign that they want to be rescued and return to society. When the fire burns low or goes out, we realize that the boys have lost sight of their desire to be rescued and have accepted their savage lives on the island. The signal fire thus functions as a kind of measurement of the strength of the civilized instinct remaining on the island. Ironically, at the end of the novel, a fire finally summons a ship to the island, but not the signal fire. Instead, it is the fire of savagerythe forest fire Jacks gang starts as part of his quest to hunt and kill Ralph. The Beast The imaginary beast that frightens all the boys stand s for the primal instinct of savagery that exists within all human beings. The boys are afraid of the beast, but only Simon reaches the realization that they fear the beast because it exists within each of them. As the boys grow more savage, their belief in the beast grows stronger. By the end of the novel, the boys are leaving it sacrifices and treating it as a totemic god. The boys behavior is what brings the beast into

existence, so the more savagely the boys act, the more real the beast seems to become. The Lord of the Flies The Lord of the Flies is the bloody, severed sows head that Jack impales on a stake in the forest glade as an offering to the beast. This complicated symbol becomes the most important image in the novel when Simon confronts the sows head in the glade and it seems to speak to him, telling him that evil lies within every human heart and promising to have some fun with him. (This fun foreshadows Simons death in the following chapter.) In this way, the Lord of the Flies becomes both a physical manifestation of the beast, a symbol of the power of evil, and a kind of Satan figure who evokes the beast within each human being. Looking at the novel in the context of biblical parallels, the Lord of the Flies recalls the devil, just as Simon recalls Jesus. In fact, the name Lord of the Flies is a literal translation of the name of the biblical name Beelzebub, a powerful demon in hell sometimes thought to be the devil himself. Ralph, Piggy, Jack, Simon, and Roger Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel, and many of its characters signify important ideas or themes. Ralph represents order, leadership, and civilization. Piggy represents the scientific and intellectual aspects of civilization. Jack represents unbridled savagery and the de sire for power. Simon represents natural human goodness. Roger represents brutality and bloodlust at their most extreme. To the extent that the boys society resembles a political state, the littluns might be seen as the common people, while the older boys represent the ruling classes and political leaders. The relationships that develop between the older boys and the younger ones emphasize the older boys connection to either the civilized or the savage instinct: civilized boys like Ralph and Simon use their power to protect the younger boys and advance the good of the group; savage boys like Jack and Roger use their power to gratify their own desires, treating the littler boys as objects for their own amusement.

Lord of the Flies is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding about a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 68 on the American Library Associations list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 19901999.[1] In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005[2] and was awarded a place on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching #41 on the editor's list, and #25 on the reader's list. Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies was Goldings first novel. Although it was not a great success at the timeselling fewer than 3,000 copies in the United States during 1955 before going out of print it soon went on to become a bestseller, and by the early 1960s was required reading in many schools and colleges. It was adapted to film in 1963 by Peter Brook, and again in 1990 by Harry Hook.

[edit] Background

The book subtly indicates that it takes place in the midst of an unspecified nuclear war, perhaps implicitly relating the savagery of the children characte rs to the warfare of adults. Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. Most (with the exception of the choirboys) appear never to have encountered one another before. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilisation, the well -educated children regress to a primitive state. At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting impulses toward civilizationlive by rules, peacefully and in harmony and towards the will to power. Different subjects include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies.[3]

[edit] Plot summary

In the midst of a wartime evacuation, a British plane crashes onto an isolated island. The only survivors are male children below the age of 13. [4] Two boys, the fair-haired Ralph and an overweight, bespectacled boy reluctantly nicknamed "Piggy" find a conch which Ralph uses as a horn to bring all the survivors to one area. Two dominant boys emerge during the meeting: Ralph and Jack Merridew, a redhead who is the leader of a choir group that was among the survivors. Ralph is voted chief, losing only the votes of Jack's fellow choirboys. Ralph asserts two goals: have fun, and work towards a rescue by maintaining a constant fire signal. They create the fire with Piggy's glasses, nearly catching the whole island on fire, and, for a time, the boys work togethe r. Jack organises his choir group into the group's "hunters", who are responsible for hunting for meat. Ralph, Jack, and a black-haired boy named Simon soon become the supreme trio among the children. Piggy, the most sensible of the bunch, is quickly outcast by his fellow "biguns" (older boys) and becomes an unwilling source of mirth for the other children. Simon, in addition to supervising the project of constructing shelters, feels an instinctive need to protect the younger boys. The original semblance of order imposed by Ralph quickly deteriorates as the majority of the boys turn idle. Around the sa me time, many of the younger boys begin to believe that the island is inhabited by a monster, referred to as "the beast". Jack gains control of the discussion by boldly promising to kill the b east. At one point, Jack summons all of his hunters to hunt down a wild pig, including those who were supposed to be maintaining the fire. A ship approaches, but passes by because the signal fire has gone out. Although the hunting of the pig turns out to be the hunters' first successful catch, Ralph is infuriated that they have missed a potential rescue. Later, Ralph envisages relinquishing his position, though Piggy discourages him from doin g so while the two of them and Simon yearn hopefully for some guidance from the adult world. After Sam and Eric report possibly seeing the beast atop a mountain, Ralph and Jack investigate; they encounter the corpse and the open parachute of a fighter pilot who has landed on the island and mistake it as "the beast" asleep. Jack assembles the children with the conch and confirms the beast's existence to

them. The meeting results in a schism, splitting the children into two groups. Ralph's group focuses on preserving the signal fire. Jack becomes the chief of his own tribe, which focuses on hunting while exploiting the iron -clad belief in the beast. As Jack and the hunters have already slain their first pig, they offer promises of meat, fun, and protection from the beast. Jack's tribe gradually becomes more animalistic, applying face paint to liberate their inner savages while they hunt. The face paint becomes a motif which recurs throughout the story, with more and more intensity toward the end. Simon, a part of Ralph's tribe, who had "cracked" and gone off looking for the beast by himself, finds the head of the hunters' dead pig on a stick, left as an offering to the beast. Simon envisions the pig head, swarming with scavenging flies, as the "Lord of the Flies" and believes that it is talking to him. Simon hears the pig identifying itself as the real "Beast" and disclosing the truth about itselfthat the boys themselves "created" the beast, and that the real beast was inside them all. Simon also locates the dead parachutist who had been mistaken for the beast, and is the sole member of the group to recognise that it is a cadaver instead of a sleeping monster. Simon attempts to alert Jack's tribe that the "beast" is nothing more than a cadaver. While trying to tell Jack's tribe of this fact, Simon is caught in a ring during a primal dance and Jack's tribe kills him, with Ralph, Piggy, Sam, and Eric in the ring also. Ralph, Piggy, Sam, and Eric later try to convince themselves that they did not take pa rt in the murder. Jack's tribe then raids Ralph's camp to steal Piggy's glasses. Ralph's tribe journeys to Jack's tribe at Castle Rock to try to retrieve the glasses. In the ensuing confrontation, Roger drops a boulder aiming at Piggy. Piggy dodges the boulder, but the conch is smashed into pieces, Piggy flies through the air and falls forty feet onto the rocks below by the sea, killing him. Sam and Eric are captured and tortured into joining Jack's tribe. Ralph is forced to flee. The following morning, Jack leads his tribe on a manhunt for Ralph. However, the fire and smoke attracts the attention of a nearby warship. Then a naval officer lands on the island near where Ralph is lying, and his sudden appearance brings the children's fighting to an abrupt halt. Upon learning of the boys' activities, the officer remarks that he would have expected better from British boys, initially believing them only to be playing a game. In the final scene, although now certain he will be rescued after all, Ralph cries.

[edit] Allegorical relationships [edit] Ralph

When he and the others arrive on the island, Ralph quickly becomes the chief of the group, not by any harsh, overt or physical action, but by being elected. [5] Ralph is described as having "the directness of genuine leadership". [6] Ralph's first big decision is that they have "got to decide if this is an island". [7] After Ralph, Jack, and Simon discover that they are truly "on an uninhabited island",[8] Ralph suggests that a fire be lit because "if a ship comes near the island they may not notice us". [9] However, towards the end of the book he forgets the initial reason for maintaining the fire. This is representative of the debilitating effects corruption has even on the brightest mind. Ra lph may seem to mean well, but often his obsession with being popular overcomes him and he resorts to bullying Piggy to regain his power. Still, in the midst of all the island's chaos, it should be noted that Ralph has a tendency to be polite and logical in the tensest of moments; for example, when the children are obliged to investigate Castle Rock, Ralph takes the lead despite being horribly afraid of "the beast". Ralph is sometimes perceived as partially being a literary tool to aid the audience's realisation of inner evil throughout the duration of the novel; "Ralph wept for the end of innocence..." Ralph embodies good intentions in the implementation of reason, but ultimately fails to execute these plans soundly. Ralph's refusal to resort to violence throughout the novel is counterpoised by Jack's inherent love of violence. Beginning with his self nomination to be Ralph's hunter, Jack eventually degenerates into the beast he is consumed with slaying. Eventually, towards the end of the story, Jack abandons the tribe and forms one of his own. His darkly irresistible nature, along with the lure of meat, immediately sways the majority of the island dwellers to his tribe, which is a much more violent group. Jack's insurrection begins a chain of events that drives the island further into chaos, initially resulting in the frenzied mob murdering Simon during a primal dance, and then culminating with the murder of Piggy by Roger before the group attempts to hunt down Ralph. [10]
[edit] Piggy

Piggy is the intellectual with poor eyesight, a weight problem, and asthma.[11] Despite his greater intelligence, he is the most physically vulnerable of all the

boys. Piggy represents an adult figure and the rational world. By frequently quoting his aunt, he also provides the only female voice. Piggy's intellect benefits the group only through Ralph; he acts as Ralph's advisor. He cannot be the leader himself because he lacks leadership qualities and has no rapport with the other boys. Piggy also relies too heavily on the power of social convention. He believes that holding the conch gives him the right to be heard. He believes that upholding social conventions produces results. As the brainy representative of civilization, Piggy asserts that "Life...is scientific".[12] Ever the pragmatist, Piggy complains, "What good're you doing talking like that?" [13] when Ralph brings up the highly charged issue of Simon's death at their hands. Piggy tries to keep life scientific despite the incident, "searching for a formula"[14] to explain the death. He asserts that the assault on Simon was an accident and justifiable because Simon asked for it by inexplicably crawling out of the forest into the ring. [14] Piggy is so intent on preserving some remnant of civilization on the island that, after J ack's tribe attacks Ralph's group, he assumes they "wanted the conch", [15] when, in fact, they have come for Piggy's glasses [15] in order to make fire. Even up to the moment of his death, Piggy's perspective does not shift in response to the reality of their situation. He can't think as others think or value what the y value. Because his eminently intellectual approach to life is modeled on the attitudes and rules of the authoritative adult world, he thinks everyone should share his values and attitudes as a matter of course. When Ralph and Piggy confront Jack's tribe about the stolen spectacles, Piggy asks "Which is better to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? [...] law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?"[16] as if there is no doubt that the boys would choose his preference.
[edit] The Conch

When first blown, it calls the children to an assembly, where Ralph is elected leader. They also agree that only the boy holding the conch may speak at meetings to forestall arguments and chaos, and that it should be passed around to those who wish to voice their opinion. The conch symbolises democracy and, like Ralph, civility and order within the group. However, when Piggy is killed, the conch is smashed into pieces at the same time. [16] Therefore, the conch's destruction signals the end of order and the onset of chaos. [3] Originally the

conch is portrayed as being very vibrant and colourful, but as the novel progresses, its colours begin to fade, the same way society begins to fade on the island.
[edit] Jack Merridew

Jack epitomizes the worst aspects of human nature when unrepressed or untempered by society. Like Ralph, Jack is a natural leader. However, unlike Ralph, Jack appeals to more primal desires in the children and relies on his status as leader of the choirboys (presumably ordained by the adults) to justify his authority. Although his way of behaving is neither disruptive nor violent at the beginning of the book, he does, at that time, express an unquenchable desire to hunt and kill a pig and spends hours in solitude traversing the island. This insatiable desire is kindled after the first time Jack is presented with killing a pig and cannot "because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood". [17] After this hesitation, for which he is most ashamed, Jack's blood lust grows more and more irrational, to the point where he abandons the fire (and causes the boys to miss a potentia l rescue) simply in order to hunt. During Jack's metamorphosis, he also begins to paint his face and body with clay and earth, masking his humanity from the pigs and inspiring terrible awe amongst the boys. Fatefully, Jack's transition into a demigod puts him on a collision course with Ralph's elected authority. As Jack leaves and takes the majority of the boys with him, lured by the promises of meat, play, and freedom, there has arisen a clear dividing line between the two. Jack represents the irrational nature of the boys while Ralph represents rationality. Under Jack's rule, the baseness of human nature is unleashed, and he initiates a period of inter-tribal violence, punishing other children, inciting the frenzy that leads to the murder of Simon, and torturing the twins until they submit to his authority. The tale ends with Jack leading many of the boys in a frenzied attempt to kill Ralph. At this time, the last remaining vestiges of civilization are gone, and Ralph's demise is only prevented by the abrupt and unexpected arrival of a naval officer. [10]
[edit] Roger

Roger, at first, is a simple "bigun" who's having fun during his stay on the island. Along with Maurice, he destroys the sand castles made by three small children. While Maurice feels guilt for kicking sand into a child's eye, Roger begins to throw stones at one of the boys, although the book states that Roger clearly threw the stones to miss, and felt the presence of civilization and society preventing him from harming the children. [18] Later, once he feels that all aspects of conventional society are gone, he is left alone to his animal urges. During another pig hunt, Roger shoves a sharpened stick up the animal's rectum while it is still alive.[19] He kills Piggy with a stone that was no longer aimed to miss, and becomes the executioner and torturer of Jack's tribe. In the final hunt for Ralph at the end of the novel, Roger is armed with "a stick sharpened at both ends,"[20] indicating his intentions of killing Ralph and offering his head as a sacrifice to the "beast". He represents the person who enjoys hurting others, and is only restrained by the rules of society. [21]
[edit] Simon

Simon is a character who represents peace and tranquility and positivity, with some references to Jesus Christ. He is very in-tune with the island, and often experiences extraordinary sensations when listening to its sounds. He loves the nature of the island. He is very positive about the future. He also has an extreme aversion to the pig's head, the "Lord of the Flies", which derides and taunts Simon in a hallucination. After this experience, Simon emerges from the forest to tell the others that the "beast" that fell from the sky is actually a deceased parachutist caught on the mountain, only to be brutally killed by the boys, who ironically mistake him for the beast and kill him in their "dance" in which they "ripped and tore at the beast". It is strongly implied that Ralph, Piggy, Sam and Eric partake in the killing. The final words that the Lord of the Flies had said to Simon vaguely predicted that his death was about to occur in this manner. Earlier in the novel Simon himself also predicts his own death when he tells Ralph that he'll "get back all right", [22] implying that, of the two of them, only Ralph will be saved. Simon's death represents the loss of truth, innocence and common sense. [10]
[edit] Naval Officer

Arriving moments before Ralph's seemingly impending death, the Royal Navy officer is surprised and disappointed to learn that the boys' society has collapsed

into chaos. He states that he would have expected "a better show" [23] from the British children. The sudden looming appearance of an adult authority figure instantly reduces the savagery of the hunt to a brutal children's game. Upon the officer asking who is in charge, Ralph answers loudly, "I am", [23] and Jack, who was previously characterised as a powerful leader, is reduced to "A little boy who wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap on his red hair and who carried the remains of a pair of spectacles at his waist". [23] In the last sentence, the officer, embarrassed by the distress of the children, turns to look at the cruiser from which his party has landed a symbol of his own adult war.
[edit] The Beast

The Beast is first mentioned by a littlun and the notion is immediately dismissed by Ralph. The Beast is thought to be within the water and described by the littluns as such. Soon after the rumours of the Beast begin to flourish, the corpse of a fighter pilot, ejected from his aircraft, falls to the island. His parachute becomes entangled in the jungle foliage in such a way that sporadic gusts of wind cause the chute to billow and the body to move as if still alive. Sam and Eric discover the parachutist in the dark and believe that it is the beast. Ralph, Jack and Roger search for the Beast and encounter it on the mountain, as well. The reality of the Beast is now firmly established in the boys' minds. Simon discovers the parachutist and realises that the beast is really only the corpse of a man. Jack's tribe feeds the Beast with the sow's head on a stick. This act symbolises Jack's willingness to succumb to the temptation of animalism. Simon is the first child on the island to realise that the Beast is created by the boys' fear. He decides that "the news must reach the others as soon as possible".[24] Meanwhile, the boys have been feasting and begin to do their tribal pig-hunting dance. When "the beast stumble[s] in to the horseshoe", [25] the frenzied, terrified boys "leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore". [26] It becomes clear that the boys have mistaken Simon for the beast and murdered him both when Golding describes "Simon's dead body move[ing] out towards the open sea", [27] and on the morning after when Ralph tells Piggy, "That was Simon. [...] That was murder". [28]
[edit] The Lord of the Flies

Namesake of the novel, the Lord of the Flies is literally a pig's head that has been cut off by Jack, put on a stick sharpened at both ends, stuck in the ground,

and left as an offering to the "beast". Created out of fear, the Lord of the Flies used to be a mother sow who, though at one time clean, loving, and innocent, has now become a manically smiling, bleeding last image of horror. Near the end of the book, while Ralph is being hunted down, he strikes this twice in one moment of blind anger, causing it to crack and fall on the floor with a grin "now six feet across".[29] This transformation clearly represents the transformation that Jack and the boys have undergone during their time in the island. In addition, the name "Lord of the Flies" is the literal English translation of Beelzebub, a demonic figure that is often considered synonymous with Satan. This discreet knowledge allows the boys descent into material savagery and mysticism further parallel the allegory of the story with western patriarchal society.

7. JOHN FOWLES
The French Lieutenants Woman (1969), by John Fowles, is a period novel inspired by the 1823 novel Ourika, by Claire de Duras, which Fowles translated to English during 1977 (and revised in 1994). Fowles was a great aficionado of Thomas Hardy, and, in particular, likened his heroine, Sarah Woodruff, to Tess Durbeyfield, the protagonist of Hardys popular novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). During 1981, director Karel Reisz and writer Harold Pinter adapted the novel as an eponymous film. During 2006, it was adapted for the stage, by Mark Healy, in a version which toured the UK that year. [1][2] In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English -language novels from 1923 to present.[3]
[edit] Plot summary

The novel's protagonist is Sarah Woodruff, the title Woman, also known by the nickname of Tragedy, and by the unfortunate nickname The French Lieutenants Woman. She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis, as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French naval officer named Varguennes--married, unknown to her, to another woman -- with whom she had supposedly had an affair and who had returned to France. She spends her limited time-off at the Cobb [sea wall], staring at the sea. One day, she is seen there by the gentleman Charles Smithson and his fiance,

Ernestina Freeman, the shallow-minded daughter of a wealthy tradesman. Ernestina tells Charles something of Sarahs story, and he develops a strong curiosity about her. Eventually, he and she meet clandestinely, during which times Sarah tells Charles her history, and asks for his support, mostly emotional. Despite trying to remain objective, Charles eventually sends Sarah to Exeter, where he, during a journey, cannot resist stopping in to visit and see her. At the time she has suffered an ankle injury; he visits her alone and after they have made love he realises that she had been, contrary to the rumours, a virgin. Simultaneously, he learns that his prospective inheritance from an elder uncle is in jeopardy; the uncle is engaged to a woman young enough to bear him an heir. Sarah is portrayed ambiguously: is she a genuine, ill -used woman? Is she a sly, manipulative cha racter using her own self-pity to get Charles to succumb to her? Is she merely a victim of the notion of gender as perceived by uppermiddle-class people of the 19th century? From there, the novelist offers three different endings for The French Lieutenants Woman.
y

First ending: Charles marries Ernestina, and their marriage is unhappy; Sarahs fate is unknown. Charles tells Ernestina about an encounter with whom he implies is the French Lieutena nts Whore, but elides the sordid details, and the matter is ended. This ending, however, might be dismissed as a daydream, before the alternative events of the subsequent meeting with Ernestina are described.

Before the second- and third endings, the narrator whom the novelist wants the reader to believe is John Fowles, himself appears as a minor character sharing a train carriage with Charles. He flips a coin to determine the order in which he will portray the two, other possible endings, emphasising their equal plausibility.
y

Second ending : Charles and Sarah become intimate; he ends his engagement to Ernestina, with unpleasant consequences. He is disgraced, and his uncle marries, then produces an heir. Sarah flees to London without telling the enamoured Charles, who searches for her for years, before finding her living with several artists (likely the Rossettis), enjoying an artistic, creative life. He then sees he has fathered a child with her; as a family, their future is open, with possible reunion implied.

Third ending : the narrator re-appears, standing outside the house where the second ending occurred; at the aftermath. He turns back his pocket watch by fifteen minutes, before leaving in his carriage. Events are the same as in the second -ending version, but, when Charles finds Sarah again, in London, their reunion is sour. It is possible that their union was childless; Sarah does not tell Charles about one, and does not express interest for continuing the relationship. He leaves the house, deciding to return to America, and sees the carriage, in which the narrator was thought gone. Raising the question: is Sarah a manipulating, lying woman of few morals, exploiting Charless obvious love to get what she wants?

En route, Fowles the novelist discourses upon the difficulties of controlling the characters, and offers analyses of differences in 19th -century customs and class, the theories of Charles Darwin, the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the literature of Thomas Hardy. He questions the role of the author when speaking of how the Charles character disobeys his orders; the characters have discrete lives of their own in the novel. Philosophic ally, Existentialism is mentioned several times during the story, and in particular detail at the end, after the portrayals of the two, apparent, equally possible endings.

ohn Robert Fowles (31 March 1926 5 November 2005) was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[1]

[edit] Biography [edit] Birth and family

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles. [2] Robert Fowles came from a family of middle-class merchants of London. Robert's father Reginald was a partner of the

firm Allen & Wright, a tobacco importer. Robert's mother died when he was 6 years old. At age 26, after receiving legal training, Robert enlisted in the Honourable Artillery Company and spent three years in the trenches of Flanders during World War I leaving him with memories that he had for the rest of his life. Robert's brother Jack died in the war, leaving a widow and three children. During 1920, the year Robert was demobilized, his father Reginald died. Robert became responsible for five young half -siblings and the children of his brother, and though he had hoped to practice law, the obligation of raising an extended family forced him into the family tra de of tobacco importing. Gladys Richards belonged to an Essex family originally from London as well. The Richards family moved to Westcliff-on-Sea during 1918, as Spanish Flu swept through Europe, for Essex was said to have a healthy climate. Robert met Gladys Richards at a tennis club in Westcliff-on-Sea during 1924. Though she was ten years younger, and he in bad health from the war, they were married a year later on 18 June 1925. Nine months and two weeks later Gladys gave birth to John Robert Fowles.

8. DORIS LESSING
Doris May Lessing CH (ne Tayler ; born 22 October 1919) is a British writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos.

Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".[1] Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. [2][3][4] In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". [5]
[edit] Background

Lessing was born in Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (ne McVeagh ), who were both English and of British nationality. [6] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in

World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation.[7][8] Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was here that Doris was born in 1919. [9][10] The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian life style amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; it was not. The farm was not successful and failed to deliver the wealth the Taylers had expected. [11] Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare).[12] She left school aged 14, and thereafter was self-educated; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material on politics and sociology that her employer gave her, [8] and began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John and Jean), before the marriage ended in 1943. [8] Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the community of the Left Book Club, a communist book club which she had joined the year before. [11][13] It was here that she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter), before the marriage also ended in divorce in 1949. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German ambassador to Uganda, and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Amin Dada.[8] When she fled to London to pursue her writing career and communist ideals, she left two toddlers with their father in South Africa (another, from her second marriage, went with her). She later said that at the time she thought she had no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother." [14]

he Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. This book, as well as the couple that followed it, enters the realm of what Margaret Drabble in The Oxford Companion to English Literature has called Lessing's "inner space fiction", her work that explores mental and societal breakdown. The book also contains a powerful anti -war and anti-Stalinist message, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a famed examination of the budding sexual and women's liberation movements. The Golden Notebook has been translated into a number of other languages. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. [1]
[edit] Plot summary

The Golden Notebook is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Molly and Anna, and their children, ex husbands and loversentitled Free Womenwith excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, coloured black (of Anna's experience in Central Africa, before and during WWII, which inspired her own bestselling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional l ife). Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from Free Women, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another. This post-modernistic styling, with its space and room for "play" engaging the characters and readers, is among the most famous features of the book, although Lessing insisted that readers and reviewers pay attention to the serious themes in the novel. [citation needed]
[edit] Major themes

All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to the above themes of Stalinism, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear conflagration, and women's struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and politics. [citation
needed]

9. ANTHONY BURGESS
Context

A prolific writer, John Anthony Burgess Wilson (19171993) didnt publish his first novel until he was almost forty. Born and raised in Manchester, England, Burgess spent most of his adult life abroad in the army before teaching in Malaya with the British Colonial Service. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1960, Burgess began writing at a frantic pace in the hope that the royalties from his books would support his wife after he died. He wrote five novels that year alone. When he later discovered that his cond ition had been misdiagnosed, Burgess continued to write and publish novels at a rapid rate. Though he wrote nearly forty novels, his most famous work is the dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange (1962), which owes much of its popularity to Stanley Kubricks 1971 film adaptation. Burgess himself thought that A Clockwork Orange was far from his best work. In an interview, he dismissed the book as gimmicky and didactic, and rued the idea that this book would survive while others that he valued more were sure to pass into obscurity. Burgesss novels address fundamental issues of human nature and morality, such as the existence of good and evil and the importance of free will. Burgess was raised as a Catholic, and though he left the church as a young man, he retained his admiration for its tenets and doctrines. Although Burgess was interested in and influenced by numerous religions, Catholicism exerted the greatest influence on his moral views. His portrayal of human beings as inherently predisposed toward violence , for example, reflects his acceptance of the Catholic view that all human beings are tainted by original sin.

Burgess was inspired to write A Clockwork Orange during a visit to Leningrad in 1961. There, he observed the state -regulated, repressive atmosphere of a nation that threatened to spread its dominion over the world. At the time of his visit, the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, and communism was establishing itself in countries as far -flung as Vietnam and Cuba. Burgess regarded communism as a fundamentally flawed system, because it shifts moral responsibility from the individual to the state while disregarding the welfare of the individual. Burgesss deeply internalized Catholic notions of free will and original sin prevented him from accepting a system that sacrifices individual freedom for the public good. A Clockwork Orange may be seen in part as an attack on communism, given the novels extremely negative portrayal of a government that seeks to solve social problems by removing freedom of choice. During his visit to Leningrad, Burgess encountered the stilyagi, gangs of thuggish Russian teenagers. While Burgess was eating dinner at a restaurant one night, a group of bizarrely dressed teenagers pounded on the door. Burg ess thought they were targeting him as a westerner, but the boys stepped aside graciously when he left and then resumed pounding. Burgess insists that he based nadsatthe invented slang of his teenage hooligans in A Clockwork Orangeon Russian for purely aesthetic reasons, but it seems likely that this startling experience influenced his portrayal of Alex and his gang. Along with English Teddy Boys, a youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s associated with American rock music, the Russian gangs provided a temp late for the hoodlums in A Clockwork Orange. However, A Clockwork Orange shouldnt be understood simply as a critique of the Soviet Union or of communism, because the dystopian world of the novel draws just as much on elements of English and American society that Burgess detested. In his own estimation, Burgess had a tendency toward anarchy, and he felt that the socialistic British welfare state was too willing to sacrifice individual liberty in favor of social stability. He despised American popular culture for fostering homogeneity, passivity, and apathy. He regarded American law enforcement as hopelessly corrupt and violent, referring to it as an alternative criminal body. Each of these targets gets lampooned in A Clockwork Orange, but Burgesss most pointed satire is reserved for the psychological movement known as behaviorism.

Popularized by Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s, behaviorism concerned itself with the study of human and animal behavior in response to stimuli. Through the application of carefully controlled system of rewards and punishmentsa process referred to as conditioningSkinner demonstrated that scientists could alter the behavior of test subjects more effectively than had previously been thought possible. (In one famous experiment, he successfully trained laboratory pigeons to play ping pong.) To many people, behaviorism seemed to offer an almost limitless potential to control human behavior, and the movement had a profound effect not onl y in academia, but on education, government, and criminal rehabilitation as well. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess satirizes behaviorism with his portrayal of the fictional Ludovicos Technique. Burgess was still a relatively unknown writer when he published A Clockwork Orange in 1962, and the novel was not an immediate success. To Burgesss dismay, the American version of the novel was published without the final chapter, in which Alex grows up and renounces violence. Burgess strongly disapproved of this decision, which he believed had distorted the novel into a nasty tale of unredeemable evil. Ironically, it was the American edition of the novel that became a cult classic among college students, and it was also the edition that Stanley Kubrick used for his 1 971 film adaptation. Stanley Kubricks film version of A Clockwork Orange was both commercially successful and highly controversial, catapulting Burgess to a much wider fame. Initially labeled with an X rating and widely criticized for glorifying sex and violence, the film was blamed for several incidents of copycat violence, including one notorious British case in which a group of men, in imitation of the film, gang-raped a woman while singing Singing in the Rain. Despite the scandal, however, Burgess remained an eminent literary personality from then on. Regarded as both an artistic luminary and an eccentric crank, Burgess made several television appearances and served as a visiting professor at universities throughout America and England. He continued writing and composing musiclike his protagonist Alex, Burgess loved classical music and considered it his first vocationuntil his death in 1993.
Plot Overview

A Clockwork Orange takes place in a futuristic city governed by a repressive, totalitarian super-State. In this society, ordinary citizens have fallen into a passive stupor of complacency, blind to the insidious growth of a rampant, violent youth culture. The protagonist of the story is Alex, a fifteen-year-old boy who narrates in a teenage slang c alled nadsat, which incorporates elements of Russian and Cockney English. Alex leads a small gang of teenage criminalsDim, Pete, and Georgiethrough the streets, robbing and beating men and raping women. Alex and his friends spend the rest of their time a t the Korova Milkbar, an establishment that serves milk laced with drugs, and a bar called the Duke of New York. Alex begins his narrative from the Korova, where the boys sit around drinking. When Alex and his gang leave the bar, they go on a crime spree t hat involves mugging, robbery, a gang fight, auto theft, breaking and entering, and rape. The last of these crimes is particularly brutal. The boys travel to the countryside with their stolen car, break into a cottage and beat up the man inside before rapi ng his wife while making him watch. They then head back to the Korova, where they fight with each other. Alex, who loves classical music, becomes angry at Dim when Dim mocks an opera that Alex likes. Alex punches Dim in the face, which prompts the others to turn against their arrogant leader. The next time they go out, they break into an old womans house. She calls the police, and before Alex can get away, Dim hits him in the eye with a chain and runs away with the others. The police apprehend Alex and take him to the station, where he later learns that the woman he beat and raped during the earlier robbery has died. Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. At first, prison is difficult for him. The guards are merciless and oppressive, and several of the other prisoners want to rape him. After a few years, though, prison life becomes easier. He befriends the prison chaplain, who notices Alexs interest in the Bible. The chaplain lets Alex read in the chapel while listening to classical music, and Alex pores over the Old Testament, delighting in the sex, drinking, and fighting he finds in its pages. One day, after fighting with and killing a cellmate, Alex is selected as the first candidate for an experimental treatment called Ludovicos Technique, a f orm of brainwashing that incorporates associative learning. After being injected with a substance that makes him dreadfully sick, the doctors force Alex to watch

exceedingly violent movies. In this way, Alex comes to associate violence with the nausea and headaches he experiences from the shot. The process takes two weeks to complete, after which the mere thought of violence has the power to make Alex ill. As an unintended consequence of the treatment, Alex can no longer enjoy classical music, which he has always associated with violence. This side effect doesnt bother the State, which considers Alexs successful treatment a victory for law and order and plans to implement it on a large scale. After two years in prison, Alex is released, a harmless human being incapable of vicious acts. Soon, however, Alex finds hes not only harmless but also defenseless, as his earlier victims begin to take revenge on him. His old friend Dim and an old enemy named Billyboy are both police officers now, and they take the opportunity to settle old scores. They drive him to a field in the country, beat him, and leave him in the rain. Looking for charity, Alex wanders to a nearby cottage and knocks on the door, begging for help. The man living there lets him in and gives him food and a room for the night. Alex recognizes him from two years ago as the man whose wife he raped, but the man does not recognize Alex, who wore a mask that night. Alex learns later in the night that the mans wife died of shock shortly after being raped. This man, F. Alexander, is a political dissident. When he hears Alexs story, he thinks he can use Alex to incite public outrage against the State. He and three of his colleagues develop a plan for Alex to make several public appearances. Alex, however, is tired of being exploited for other peoples schemes. He berates the men in nadsat, which arouses the suspicion of F. Alexander, who still remembers the strange language spoken by the teenagers who raped his wife. Based on F. Alexanders suspicion, the men change their plans. They lock Alex in an apartment and blast classical music through the wall, hoping to drive Alex to suicide so they can blame the government. Alex does, in fact, hurl himself out of an attic window, but the fall doesnt kill him. While he lies in the hospital, unconscious, a political struggle ensues, but the current administration survives. State doctors undo Ludovicos Technique and restore Alexs old vicious self in exchange for Alexs endorsement. Back to normal, Alex assembles a new gang and engages in the same behavior as he did before prison, but he soon begins to tire of a life of violence. After running into his old friend Pete, who is now married and living a normal life, Alex decides

that such a life is what he wants for himself. His final thoughts are of his future son.
Themes, Motifs, & Symbols

Themes Themes are the fundamental and often univers al ideas explored in a literarywork. The Inviolability of Free Will More than anything, Burgess believed that the freedom to choose is the big human attribute, meaning that the presence of moral choice ultimately distinguishes human beings from machines or lower animals. This belief provides the central argument of A Clockwork Orange, where Alex asserts his free will by choosing a course of wickedness, only to be subsequently robbed of his self-determination by the government. In making Alex a criminal guilty of violence, rape, and theft the hero of the novel, Burgess argues that humanity must, at all costs, insist that individuals be allowed to make their own moral choices, even if that freedom results in depravity. When the State removes Alexs power to choose his own moral course of action, Alex becomes nothing more than a thing. A human beings legitimacy as a moral agent is predicated on the notion that good and evil exist as separate, equally valid choices. Without evil as a valid option, the choice to be good becomes nothing more than an empty, meaningless gesture. The novels treatment of this theme includes, but is not limited to, the presentation of a Christian conception of morality. The chaplain, the novels clearest advocate for Christian morals, addresses the dangers of Alexs Reclamation Treatment when he te lls Alex that goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man. F. Alexander echoes this sentiment, albeit from a different philosophical standpoint, when he tells Alex that the treatment has turned [him] into something other a human being. [He has] no power of choice any longer. Burgesss novel ultimately supports this conception of morality as a matter of choice and determination and argues that good behavior is meaningless if one does not actively choose goodness.

The Inherent Evil of Government Just as A Clockwork Orange champions free will, it deplores the institution of government, which systematically seeks to suppress the individual in favor of the collective, or the state. Alex articulates this notion when he contend s, in Part One, Chapter 4, that modern history is the story of individuals fighting against large, repressive government machines. As we see in A Clockwork Orange, the State is prepared to employ any means necessary to ensure its survival. Using technological innovation, mass-market culture, and the threat of violence, among other strategies, the State seeks to control Alex and his fellow citizens, who are least dangerous when they are most predictable. The State also does not tolerate dissent. Once technology helps to clear its prisons by making hardened criminals harmless, the State begins incarcerating dissidents, like F. Alexander, who aim to rouse public opinion against it and thus threaten its stability. The Necessity of Commitment in Life Burgess saw apathy and neutrality as two of the greatest sins of postwar England, and these qualities abound in A Clockwork Orange. Burgess satirizes them heavily, especially in his depiction of Alexs parents. Fearful of going outside and content to be lulled to s leep by a worldcast program, Alexs parents exemplify what Burgess saw as the essentially torpid nature of middle -class citizens. Conversely, Burgess makes Alex, whose proactive dedication to the pursuit of pleasure causes great suffering, the hero of his novel. Alex himself seems disgusted by neutrality, which he sees as a function of thingness, or inhumanity. Duality as the Ultimate Reality Coined by Burgess in an interview, this phrase reflects Burgesss understanding of the world as a set of funda mental and coequal oppositions of forces. A Clockwork Orange abounds with dualities: good versus evil, commitment versus neutrality, man versus machine, man versus government, youth versus maturity, and intellect versus intuition, to name some of the most prominent ones. The important aspect of this theme is that, while one element of a given duality may be preferable to the other such as good over evileach force is equally essential in explaining the dynamics of the world. To know one of the opposing forces is to implicitly know the other. The notion of duality comes into play in A Clockwork Orange particularly during the debate over good and

evil, where Alex at one point debunks the validity of a political institution that does not account for individual evil as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes. Nadsat Nadsat is the single most striking literary device that Burgess employs. An invented slang that incorporates mostly Russian and Cockney English, Alex uses nadsat to describe the world of A Clockwork Orange. Its initial effect is one of exclusion and alienation, as the reader actively deals with the foreignness of Alexs speech. This effect is important because it keeps us removed from the intensely brutal violence that Alex perpetrates. Before we can evaluate Alexs character, we must first come to identify with him on his terms: to speak his language, literally. In this way, Alex implicates us in the remorseless violence he commits throughout most of Part One, and we in turn develop sympathy for him as our narrator. In some sense, then, nadsat is a form of brainwashingas we develop this new vocabulary, it subtly changes the ways we think about things. Nadsat shows the subtle, subliminal ways that language can control others. As the popular idiom of the teenager, nadsat seems to enter the collective consciousness on a subcultural level, a notion that hints at an undercurrent of burgeoning repression. Nadsats origins also help to illuminate the world that Burgess chooses to depict in the novel. The combination of Russian and English indicates that Alexs society is inspired by the two major superpowers of Burgesss time, American capitalist democracy and Soviet Communism, suggesting that the two entities are not as far apart from one another as we might have thought. Classical Music Classical music enters A Clockwork Orange on a number of levels. On the formal level, the structure of the novel is patterned after musical forms. The novel, which is divided into three parts of seven chapters each, assumes an ABA form, analogous to an operatic aria. Accordingly, Parts 1 and 3 are mirror images of each other, while Part Two is substantially different. The A sections both take place on the streets near Alexs home and in a country cottage, while

the B section takes place in a jail. The A sections begin with Alex asking himself Whats it going to be then, eh? The B section begins with the same question, but this time, the prison chaplain asks the question to Alex. The A sections identify Alex by name, while the B section identifies him by number. Additionally, the A sections, as mirror images of each other, feature inversions of the same plot. Whereas, in Part One, Alex preys on unwitting and unwilling victims, in Part Three those same victims wittingly and willingly prey on him. These formal symmetries help us to make comparisons as the thematic material develops over the course of the novel. On a textual level, Burgess studs the novel with repeated phrases, a very common feature of classical music. Alex supplies these linguistic motifs when he howls out out out out to his friends, or tells us that it was a flip dark chill winter evening though dry, or when he begins the books three parts as well as the final chapterwith the question Whats it going to be then, eh? Burgess was unique as a writer, in that he aspired to adapt the forms of classical music in his writing. His novel Napoleon Symphony derives its structure from Beethovens Third Symphony, which was initially written for Napoleon. Classical music also enters A Clockwork Orange on a narrative and thematic level. Though Burgess probably did not intend it to, Alexs love of classical music within the confines of the novels repressive government invokes Plato, who argued that the enjoyment of music must be suppressed if social order is to be preserved. Plato identifies music with revolutionary pleasure, an association that may easily be applied to Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Alexs love of classical music is inextricable from his love of violence, and he rarely thinks of one without the other. Both of these passions fly in the face of a government that, above all else, desires a Platonic order. It is thus no accident that Alexs taste for Beethoven and Mozart sours once he undergoes Reclamation Treatment. Christ The repeated references to Christ serve two functions in the novel. First, they provide a structural and thematic analogy for Alexs life. Alex is a martyr figure who gives up his individual identity for the citizens of his society. His attempted suicide in the last third of the book works as a sacrifice that exposes the repressive States evils. In addition, Alexs narrative goes through a succession

of three stages that invoke Christs three final days. As Jesus dies, is buried, and is resurrected on the third day, Alex gets caught, is buried in prison, and returns to his former self by the end of the novel. Alex occasionally alludes to Christ, such as when he refers to himself as a Christ figure in Part One, calling himself the fruit of [his mothers] womb, and again in Part Two, when he mentions turning the other cheek after being punched in the face. Second, the repeated Christ references subtly insinuate that the State is using Alexs violent impulses against him. Alexs impulse toward violence twice leads him to identify with the Romans who torture and crucify Christ. In this way, Alex unwittingly aligns himself with the State, since the Romans who crucified Christ were, in effect, the State of biblical times. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Milk As a substance that primarily nourishes young animals, milk symbolizes the immaturity and passivity of the people who habitually drink it at the Korova Milkbar. Their drinking of milk suggests the infantilization and subsequent helplessness of the States citizens. By virtue of its whiteness and homogenization, milk also symbolizes uniformity among the teenagers who drink it. The fact that the milk is laced with drugs is ironic, suggesting that these youths are less wholesome and innocent than adults, not more. Drencrom, Vellocet, and Synthemesc Referred to generically as hallucinogens in this study guide, these three drugs symbolize neutrality, or thingness. The people in the novel who use them become inhuman while experiencing the effects of them, receding from the reality around them. Images of Darkness, Night, and the Moon These things are associated with Alexs domain, and thus represent peace and security to him. The chaplain, who is garbed in black and def ends Alex against the State, might also fall into this category of objects. Darkness represents the

privacy and solitude necessary for an individual will to exist and make choices freely. Images of Lightness and Day Daytime and sunlight represent danger for Alex. In Part One, Alex notes that there are several more policemen figures of repressionout patrolling during the day. The harsh lights of the police station interrogation room create a kind of artificial day, and the doctors, with their white jackets, continue the trend of brightness being associated with threat and menace. The only time the chaplain wears white is during an exchange with Alex, where the chaplain gets Alex to snitch on his fellow prisoners in order to further his own career ambitions. Lightness represents the demystification of the individual.

A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 dystopian novella by Anthony Burgess. The novel contains an experiment in language: the characters often use an argot called "Nadsat", derived from Russian. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked A Clockwork Orange 65th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century .

[edit] Meaning of title

Burgess gave more than one explanation for the origins of the title. In a prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, Burgess wrote that the title was a metaphor for "...an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton." [1]

In his essay, "Clockwork Oranges," Burgess asserts that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness." This title alludes to the protagonist's positively conditioned responses to feeling s of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will. To reverse this conditioning, the protagonist is subjected to a technique in which his emotional responses to violence are systematically paired with a negative stimulation in the form of nausea caused by an emetic medicine administered just before the presentation of films depicting violent, and "ultra -violent" situations.
[edit] Plot summary [edit] Part 1: Alex's world

Alex, a teenager living in near-future England, leads his gang on nightly orgies of opportunistic, random "ultra-violence." Alex's friends ("droogs" in the novel's Anglo-Russified slang, Nadsat) are Dim, a slow-witted bruiser who is the gang's muscle; Georgie, an ambitious second-in-command; and Pete, who mostly plays along as the droogs indulge their taste for ultra-violence. Alex is characterized as a sociopath and a hardened juvenile delinquent; he is nonetheless intelligent and quick-witted, with sophisticated taste in music. He is particularly fond of Beethoven, or "Lovely Ludwig Van." The novel begins with the droogs sitting in their favourite hangout, drin king drugged milk, called "milk-plus", to hype themselves for the night's mayhem. They assault a scholar walking home from the library, stomp a panhandling derelict, scuffle with a rival gang, then rob a newsstand and leave its owners bloodied and unconscious. Joyriding through the countryside in a stolen car, they break into an isolated cottage and maul the young couple living there, beating the husband and raping his wife. In a metafictional touch, the husband is a writer working on a manuscript called "A Clockwork Orange," and Alex contemptuously reads out a paragr aph that states the novel's main theme before shredding the manuscript. Back at the milk bar, Alex punishes Dim for some crude behaviour, and strains within the gang become apparent. At home in his dreary flat, Alex plays classical music at top volume while fantasizing of even more orgiastic violence. Alex skips school the next day. Following an unexpected visit from P.R. Deltoid, his "post-corrective advisor," Alex meets a pair of underage girls and

takes them back to his parents' flat, where he administers them hard drugs and then rapes them. That evening, Alex finds his droogs in a mutinous mood. Georgie challenges Alex for leadership of the gang, demanding that they pull a "man-sized" job. Alex quells the rebellion by slashing Dim's hand and fighting with Georgie, then in a show of generosity takes them to a bar, where Alex insists on following through on Georgie's idea to burgle the home of a wealthy old woman. The break-in starts as farce and ends in murder as Alex kills the elderly woman. His escape is blocked by Dim, who leaves him disabled on the front step as the police arrive.
[edit] Part 2: Ludovico's Technique

Sentenced to prison for murder, Alex works in the prison library and gets taken under the wing of the prison chaplain, who mistakes Alex's Bible studies for stirrings of faith (Alex is actually reading Scripture for the violent passages). After Alex beats a troublesome cellmate to death, he is accepted into an experimental behaviour-modification treatment called the Ludovico Technique. The technique is a form of aversion therapy in which Alex is injected with a drug that makes him feel sick and is forced to watch graphically violent f ilms, eventually conditioning him to suffer crippling bouts of nausea at the mere thought of violence. As an unintended consequence, the soundtrack to one of the films Beethoven's Fifth Symphony renders Alex unable to listen to his beloved classical music. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated to a group of VIPs, who watch as Alex collapses before a whalloping bully, and abases himself be fore a scantily-clad young woman whose presence has aroused his predatory sexual inclinations. Though the prison chaplain accuses the state of stripping Alex of free will, the government officials on the scene are pleased with the results and Alex is released into society.
[edit] Part 3: After prison

Barred from returning home (his parents are now renting his room to a lod ger), the defenseless Alex wanders the streets and accidentally encounters his former victims, all of whom are keen for revenge. The policemen who come to Alex's rescue turn out to be none other than Dim and former gang rival Billyboy. In the film adaptation, the police officers are Dim and Georgie, his former droogs, who take Alex to the town's edge, beat him, and half -drown him in a cattle

water trough. Dazed and bloodied, Alex collapses at the door of an isolated cottage, realising too late that it is the house he and his droogs invaded in the first half of the story. Because the gang wore masks during the assault, Alex goes unrecognised. The writer, whose name is revealed as F. Alexander, shelters Alex and questions him about the conditioning. During thi s sequence, it is revealed that Mrs. Alexander died from the injuries inflicted during the gang rape, and her husband has decided to continue "where her fragrant memory persists" despite the horrid memories. Though Alexander, a critic of the government, hopes to use Alex as a symbol of state brutality, he begins to suspect the worst. One of Alexander's radical associates wrangles a semi confession from Alex, who is then subjected to a relentless barrage of classical music, prompting him to attempt suicide by leaping from a high window. Alex wakes up in hospital, where he is courted by government officials anxious to counter the bad publicity created by his suicide attempt. With Alexander safely packed off to a mental institution, Alex is offered a cushy job if he agrees to play ball. As photographers snap pictures, Alex daydreams of orgiastic violence and realises the Ludovico conditioning has been reversed: "I was cured all right." In the final chapter, Alex has a new trio of droogs, but he is beginning to outgrow his taste for violence. A chance encounter with his old droog Pete, now married and settled down, inspires Alex to seek a wife and family of his own. He contemplates the likelihood that any son of his will also be violent, a prospect Alex views fatalistically.
[edit] Omission of the final chapter

The book has three parts of seven chapters each. Burgess has stated that the total of 21 chapters was an intentional nod to the age of 21 being recognised as a milestone in human maturation. The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986. [2] In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he first brought the book to an American publisher, he was told that U.S. audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways, decides he has lost all energy for and thrill from violence and resolves to turn his life around (a slow -ripening but classic

moment of metanoia the moment at which one 's protagonist realises that everything he thought he knew was wrong). At the American publisher's insistence, Burgess allowed their editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the U.S. version, so that the tale would end on a note of bleak despair, with Alex succumbing to his darker nature an ending which the publisher insisted would be 'more realistic' and appealing to a U.S. audience. The film adaptation, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is based on the American edition of the book (which Burgess considered to be "badly flawed"). Kubrick called Chapter 21 "an extra chapter" and claimed [3] that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, and that he had never given serious consideration to using it. To Kubrick, the final chapter was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book.
[edit] Characters
y

Alex: The novel's anti-hero and leader among his droogs. He often refers to himself as "Your Humble Narrator." (Having seduced two girls in a music shop, Alex refers to himself as "Alexander the Large" while ravishing them; this was later the basis for Alex's claimed surname DeLarge in the 1971 film.) George or Georgie : Effectively Alex's greedy second-in-command. Georgie attempts to undermine Alex's status as leader of the gang. He later dies from a botched robbery attempt during Alex's stay in prison. Pete: The most rational and least violent member of the gang. He is the only one who doesn't take particular sides when the droogs fight among themselves. He later meets and marries a girl, renouncing his old ways and even losing his former speech patterns. A chance encounter with Pete in the final chapter influences Alex's wishes to reform and become a productive member of society. Dim: An idiotic and thoroughly gormless member of the gang, persistently condescended to by Alex, but respected to some extent by his droogs for his formidable fighting abilities, his weapon of choice being a length of bike chain. He later becomes a police officer, exacting his revenge on Alex for the abuse he once suffered under his command.

P. R. Deltoid: An anally retentive social worker assigned the task of keeping Alex on the straight and narrow. He seemingly has no clue about dealing with young people, and is devoid of empat hy or understanding for his troublesome charge. Indeed, when Alex is arrested for murdering an old woman, and then ferociously beaten by several police officers, Deltoid simply spits on him. The prison chaplain : The character who first questions whether or not forced goodness is really better than chosen wickedness. The only character who is truly concerned about Alex's welfare; he is not taken seriously by Alex, though. (He is nicknamed by Alex "prison charlie" or "chaplin," a nod to Charlie Chaplin.) Billyboy : A rival of Alex's. Early on in the story, Alex and his droogs battle Billyboy and his droogs, which ends abruptly when the police arrive. Later, after Alex is released fr om prison, Billyboy (along with Dim, who like Billboy has become a police officer) rescue Alex from a mob, then subsequently beat him. The governor : The man who decides to let Alex "choose" to be the first reformed by the Ludovico technique. Dr. Branom: Brodsky's colleague and co-founder of the Ludovico technique. He appears friendly and almost paternal towards Alex at first, before forcing him into the theatre to be psychologically tortured. Dr. Brodsky: A malevolent scientist and co-founder of the Ludovico technique. He seems much more passive than Branom, and says considerably less. F. Alexander : An author who was in the process of typing his magnum opus A Clockwork Orange, when Alex and his droogs broke into his house, beat him and then brutally gang raped his wife, which caused her subsequent death. He is left deeply scarred by these events, and when he encounters Alex two years later he uses him as a guinea pig in a sadistic experiment intended to prove the inefficiency of the Ludovico technique.

[edit] Analysis [edit] Title

Burgess gave three possible origins for the title:

y

That he had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange" in a London pub in 1945 and assumed it was a Cockney expression. In Clockwork Marmalade, an essay published in the Listener in 1972, he said that he had heard the phrase several times since that occasion. However, no other record of the expression being used before 1962 has ever appeared. [1] Kingsley Amis notes in his Memoirs (1991) that no trace of it appears in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang. His second explanation was that it was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning "man". The novel contains no other Malay words or links. [1] In a prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, he wrote that the title was a metaphor for "...an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton." [1] In his essay, "Clockwork Oranges," Burgess asserts that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness." This title alludes to the protagonist's negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil, which prevent the exercise of his free will.

[edit] Point of view

A Clockwork Orange is written using a narrative first-person singular perspective of a seemingly biased and unreliable narrator. The protagonist, Alex, never justifies his actions in the narration, giving a sense that he is somewhat sincere; a narrator who, as unlikeable as he may attempt to seem, evokes pity from the reader by telling of his unending suffering, and later through his realisation that the cycle will never end. Alex's perspective is effective in that the way that he describes events is easy to relate to, even if the situations themselves are not.
[edit] Use of slang

Main article: Nadsat

The book, narrated by Alex, contains many words in a slang argot which Burgess invented for the book, called Nadsat. It is a mix of modified Slavic words, rhyming slang, derived Russian (like baboochka), and words invented by Burgess himself. For instance, these terms have the following meanings in Nadsat: droog = friend; korova = cow; risp = shirt; golova ('gulliver') = head; malchick or malchickiwick = boy; soomka = sack or bag; Bog = God; khorosho ('horrorshow') = good; prestoopnick = criminal; rooka ('rooker') = hand; cal = crap; veck ('chelloveck') = man or guy; litso = face; malenky = little; and so on. One of Alex's doctors explains the language to a colleague as "odd bits of old rhyming slang; a bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav propaganda. Subliminal penetration." Some words are not derived from anything, but merely easy to guess, e.g. 'in -out, in-out' or 'the old in-out' means sexual intercourse. Cutter, however, means 'money,' because 'cutter' rhymes with 'bread-and-butter'; this is rhyming slang, which is intended to be impenetrable to outsiders (especially eavesdropping po licemen). In the first edition of the book, no key was provided, and the reader was left to interpret the meaning from the context. In his appendix to the restored edition, Burgess explained that the slang would keep the book from seeming dated, and served to muffle "the raw response of pornography" from the acts of violence. Furthermore, in a novel where a form of brainwashing plays a role, the narrative itself brainwashes the reader into understanding Nadsat. The term "ultraviolence," referring to excessive and/or unjustified violence, was coined by Burgess in the book, which includes the phrase "do the ultra -violent." The term's association with aesthetic violence has led to its use in the media. [4][5][6][7]
[edit] Author's dismissal

In 1985, Burgess published the book Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence (Heinemann, London), and while discussing Lady Chatterley's Lover in the concluding chapter, he compared that novel's notoriety with A Clockwork Orange: "We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a centu ry ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of

the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover."

10. DAVID LODGE

David John Lodge CBE, (born 28 January 1935 at Brockley, London, England) is an English author.

In his novels, Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular. He was brought up Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism is a major theme. Examples include his novels The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), How Far Can You Go? (1980; published in the U.S. as Souls and Bodies) and Paradise News (1991).

[edit] Biography

Lodge's first published novel The Picturegoers (1960) draws on his early experiences in 'Brickley' (based on Brockley in S E London) , which are also described in his novel Therapy. World War II forced Lodge and his mother to evacuate to Surrey and Cornwall. [1] Lodge studied at University College London, obtaining a BA (with honours) in 1955. In 1959 he married Mary Frances Jacob and received an MA from UCL. He went on to obtain a PhD at the University of Birmingham, and taught English literature there from 1960 until 1987, being particularly noted for his lectures on Victorian fiction. From 1964 -5 he was Harkness Fellow in the United States[2]. He retired from his post at Birmingham in 1987 to become a full-time writer, but retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University and continues to live in Birmingham. His papers are housed in the University of Birmingham Library's Special Collections.

Apart from his frequent themes of academia and Roman Catholicism, Lodge's works tend to feature the same fictional locales. The town of "Rummidge", modelled after Birmingham (UK), and the equally imaginary US state of "Euphoria", situated between the states of "North California" and "South California" feature prominently. Euphoria's State University is located in the city of "Plotinus", a thinly disguised version of Berkeley, California. Several of his novels, including Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1989), have been adapted as television series, the latter by Lodge himself. Nice Work was filmed at the University of Birmingham. In 1994 Lodge adapted Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit for the BBC. In 1997 David Lodge was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, and in the 1998 New Years Honours list, he was appointed CBE for his services to literature. Two of Lodge's novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 Lodge was himself chairman of the Booker Prize judges. His comic novel Deaf Sentence (2008), about a hard-of-hearing, retired academic, is based on his own hearing problems.

11. JULIAN BARNES

Julian Patrick Barnes (born January 19, 1946 in Leicester, England) is a contemporary English writer. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize (Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005)). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. barnes is one of the best-loved English writers in France, where he has won several literary prizes, including the Prix Mdicis for Flauberts Parrot, and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. He is an officer of LOrdre des Arts et des Lettres.[4]

[edit] Early life

Although born in Leicester, his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks later.[5][6] Both of his parents were teachers of French.[7] He was said

that his support for Leicester FC was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. [8] He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination". [9] As an adolescent he lived in Northwood, Middlesex, the 'Metroland' of which he named his first novel. [10] He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. [11] After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. [12] He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review.[13] During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, saying: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff". [14] From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer.[15]

From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six -book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight, his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series ("Not just sound-bite snacks for short attention spans, but unfolding feasts that leave you with a sense of wonder", The Sunday Times[3]) is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.

The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) is a comic novel by British author David Lodge about a 25-year-old poverty-stricken student of English literature who, rather than work on his thesis (entitled "The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern English Novels") in the reading room of the British Museum, is time and again distracted from his work and who gets into all kinds of trouble instead.
[edit] Summary

Set in Swinging London, the novel describes one day in the life of Adam Appleby, who lives in constant fear that his wife might be pregnant again with a fourth child. As Catholics, they are denied any form of contraception and have to play "Vatican roulette" instead. Adam and Barbara have three children: Clare, Dominic, and Edward; their friends ask if they intend working through the whole alphabet. In the course of only one busy day, several chances to make some mone y present themselves to Adam. For example, he is offered the opportunity to edit a deceased scholar's unpublished manuscripts; however, when he eventually has a look at them, he feels uncomfortable realizing that the man's writings are worthless drivel. Also, at the house in Bayswater where he is supposed to get the papers, Adam has to cope with an assortment of weird characters ranging from butchers to a young virgin intent on seducing him. Lodge's novel makes extensive use of pastiche, incorporating passages where both the motifs and the styles of writing used by various authors are imitated. For instance, there is a Kafkaesque scene where Adam has to renew his readingroom ticket. The final chapter of the novel is a monologue by Adam's wife in the style of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses. This use of different styles mirrors James Joyce's Ulysses, a work also about a single day. When Lodge's novel first came out, quite a number of reviewers and critics, not appreciating the literary allusions, found fault with Lodge for his inhomogeneous writing. [1]