Social Warnings in Literature

Throughout time, works of literature have often carried messages of great social importance. It is essential to understand these significant themes and agendas in order to understand the basis of the novels. Throughout The Prophet’s Hair by Salman Rushdie, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, there is much evidence supporting the idea of social or political ‘warnings,’ one could argue, about the functionality of society and those who govern said societies. The philosophies discovered by the reader (set there purposely by the author) provide the means to the essential bridge between reading literature and understanding the possibilities and comprehending the literature in question. Allegorically speaking, these three works all contain separate yet important contexts regarding social structures, ideas and the consequences of both notions. Religion and its relationship with the state and the people, as well as the evil of money and social detachment are just a few of the critical ideologies used by Wells, Burgess and Rushdie. There is substantial proof supporting the idea of numerous political and social agendas in both The Prophet’s Hair and War of the Worlds, and in A Clockwork Orange.

In the short story The Prophet’s Hair, the author fills the plot with all sorts of messages of exaggeration and religious implications and customs. There are also symbols of the need for segregation between the state and religious beliefs, and societal greed and corruption. The author, Salman Rushdie, wrote The Prophet’s Hair as an inflated tale of what is emphatically seen as the Muslim ‘norm.’ Although it plays to the closed-mindedness of the typical Westerner, the much bigger point of this over-exag...

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...olitical digs help define our society and social beliefs on the history of these works of literature and on the modernity of our lives thus far as referred to in the books. The themes of detachment, religion and the state and the illusion of the government maintaining total control over national and international relations can leave one with a solid sense of security if they don’t ask questions or read ‘between the lines’ of these books and understand the meanings in each novel. The official connotations meant by the books can be interpreted in different manners, as readers see what they wish to see in the book. The hidden political and social agenda of these three books offers an eye-opening perspective of the importance of social awareness and what we, as a society, can do in the future to prevent some of these events from representing themselves in our lives.