The Stain of Mankind
In life you are faced with many challenges and hardships. It is these experiences and how you react to them that shapes and gives you your character. The Human Stain, a novel by Philip Roth is a detailed account of the past of the characters and how the choices that they made build them to be the person that they are today. Everyone has things that they are not proud of from their past. These are essentially the human stains that Roth used as a foundation for The Human Stain. These stains are not limited to a specific person, gender, race, or even society. The prominent stain that affects the protagonist is with his own race. Many of the past experiences that the characters go through take place during America’s own stains, like the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and the Bill Clinton sex scandal. It is hardships that we have gone through as a country to make us who we are now. Taking a more in-depth look at each character past allows the reader to see the overall message and meaning of the novel. Each of their human stains intertwine to provide the complexity of The Human Stain’s plot.
Roth introduces us to the protagonist Coleman Silk. The reader finds out more about Silk than any other character in the novel. Coleman was a dean at Athena College and later stepped down to teach. For five weeks, two students failed to attend Coleman’s class. Coleman started his lecture on the sixth week by inquiring the whereabouts of these two “mystery” students asking the class, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks”(Roth 6). After he said that, it was found out that the two students were black. Coleman was brought in front of the board of directors and fired because of the racial nature...
... middle of paper ...
...ho he truly is. The mixing and integration of the characters human stain’s separates this book from any other novel in uniqueness and gives the reader a lasting impression of The Human Stain.
Works Cited
Johnson, James. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 2009. Print.
Remnick, David. "Into the Clear." The New Yorker (2000): 76-89. Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Vintage. Print.
Slater, Elaine B. "Tragedy and Farce in Roth’s The Human Stain." Critique 43.3 (2002). Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. .
Wandler, Stephen. ""A Negro's Chance": Ontological Luck in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man." African American Review (2008). Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. .
Heller, Joseph. "Chapter 21." Catch-22. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004. 210. Print.
What defines an individual’s racial characteristics? Does an individual have the right to discriminate against those that are “different” in a specific way? In Octavia Butler’s works, which are mostly based on themes that correlate to one another, she influences the genre and fiction in ways that bring light to the problems of societies history. Through Kindred and the Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler examines themes of community, racial identification, and racial oppression through the perspective of a black feminist. In each novel, values and historical perspective show the hardships that individuals unique to an alien world have to face. Through the use of fictional works, Butler is able to delve into historical themes and human conditions, and with majority of works under the category of science fiction, Butler is able to explore these themes through a variety of settings. This essay will discuss two of Butler’s popular works, Kindred and the Parable of Sower, and will interpret the themes of women, race, independence, and power throughout the two novels.
Nye, Howard. PHIL 250 B1, Winter Term 2014 Lecture Notes – Ethics. University of Alberta.
Law and Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 33-63. JSTOR. 2 November 2008.
In Harry Mulisch’s novel The Assault, the author not only informs society of the variance in perception of good and evil, but also provides evidence on how important it is for an innocent person experiencing guilt to come to terms with their personal past. First, Mulisch uses the characters Takes, Coster, and Ploeg to express the differences in perspective on the night of the assault. Then he uses Anton to express how one cannot hide from the past because of their guilt. Both of these lessons are important to Mulisch and worth sharing with his readers.
...e, history, and blood. The specific commingling that emerges, however, has common roots in its very diversity. Throughout her tale Menchaca's allegiance is clearly to her race, and while the bias comes through, the history she traces is never the less compelling. The strongest achievement of this book is that it fundamentally shifts the gaze of its reader by reifying race and celebrating its complexity.
The Web. 15 Jan. 2015. Burroughs, Todd. Steven. In the "In The Brief." Crisis (2009): 10-14.
Cleckley, Hervey M. Introduction. The Mask of Sanity. New York: New American Library, 1982. N. pag. Web.
In society, race clearly affects one’s life chances. These are the chances of getting opportunities and gaining experience for progression. The social construction of race is based on privileges and availability of resources. Looking at society and the formation of race in a historical context, whites have always held some sort of delusional belief of a “white-skin privilege.” This advantage grants whites an advantage in society whether one desires it or not. This notion is often commonly referred to as reality.
This is an odd little book, but a very important one nonetheless. The story it tells is something like an extended parablethe style is plain, the characters are nearly stick figures, the story itself is contrived. And yet ... and yet, the story is powerful, distressing, even heartbreaking because the historical trend it describes is powerful, distressing, even heartbreaking.
Chalmers, James. "Plain Truth." Shi, David and Mayer, Holly. For the Record. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013.
Coontz, Stephanie. “For Better, For Worse.” The Contemporary Reader. Ed. Gary Goshgarian. 10th edition. Boston: Longman, 2011. 496-499. Print.
Stories are often left untold or forgotten. The stories that are deemed profound or are remembered are of fact or evident to the masses. The stories that make up history, such as the African Americans’ fight for equality, are made up of concrete events that were witnessed. On the contrary, stories like the narrator’s in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are generally overlooked because they are focused on an individual’s experience. This is due to the theory that humanity is naturally self-involved, but also ashamed because the majority of our experiences consist of challenges. The narrator’s story was filled with past humiliations that were the major cornerstones to his identity. He illustrated the significance of embracing our humiliations, or
The main character is completely alienated from the world around him. He is a black man living in a white world, a man who was born in the South but is now living in the North, and his only form of companionship is his dying wife, Laura, whom he is desperate to save. He is unable to work since he has no birth certificate—no official identity. Without a job he is unable to make his mark in the world, and if his wife dies, not only would he lose his lover but also any evidence that he ever existed. As the story progresses he loses his own awareness of his identity—“somehow he had forgotten his own name.” The author emphasizes the main character’s mistreatment in life by white society during a vivid recollection of an event in his childhood when he was chased by a train filled with “white people laughing as he ran screaming,” a hallucination which was triggered by his exploration of the “old scars” on his body. This connection between alienation and oppression highlight Ellison’s central idea.
Goldratt, Eliyahu M. and Cox, Jeff. The Goal. Great Barrington, Mass.: The North River Press, 1992.