John “Binx” Bolling is a 1960s version of Dante, a man awoken in the middle of his life beginning a desperate and philosophical search for meaning. Like The Inferno, The Moviegoer is set in a Catholic liturgically important time and spans the length of a week. The reader meets Binx on Mardi Gras, the last day of Epiphany season, and on Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance and reassessment in Catholicism, he begins his search. The meaning of Binx’s search is questioned from the onset of the book. He addresses the reader by saying, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” Binx’s search …show more content…
The most important person in Binx’s search is his half-brother Lonnie. Lonnie drags Binx out of his self-induced isolation with his approach to life. Binx doubts his individualistic life by seeing Lonnie’s resilience and insistence on love. For Lonnie, living with illness, everyday is authentic; everyday is a fight against mortality. Lonnie mirrors the completion of all the goals of Binx’s search. He is the only character who has successfully found the meaning that Binx searches for and therefore only requires Binx to be …show more content…
After an argument with his aunt, she finally realizes his true self and this admission enables Binx to emerge from his malaise, no longer pretending to be the perfect citizen. When Binx sees Kate walking toward him on the beach his eyes are opened and he changes his way of life; no longer does Binx desire the unemotional fling with Joyce. Binx chooses to end the everydayness by marrying Kate and enrolling in medical school in order to make an impact on the world. Binx’s realization on the ill-advised trip to Chicago is that Kate needs him and her neediness gives Binx the meaning, which he sought. Again he faces mortality when Lonnie dies, but in contrast to his dealing with death at the beginning of the novel Binx shows his change as he begins acting toward his much younger siblings like an adult and not another child. Through the satisfaction Lonnie receives in his love and service to others and through Kate’s reliance on him, Binx begins to realize that freedom and authenticity are not achieved in isolation and individualism, but instead that it comes from service and fellowship with others. For the first time Binx has moved outside himself, embracing, a different everydayness. Through rejecting his self-imposed isolation and accepting love and service to others, Binx finds authenticity in the everyday. Through these relationships he finds himself as a Somebody, Somewhere
Both Alex and Clinton struggle with problems of their family and others. Alex feels as if he is treated different when hes is, but thats not what he wants everyone to treat him as,by his family, Jennifer, and other people. Clinton is treated as an outcast, his friends don’t want to hang out with him no more and his little sister treats him as a monster. He begins to realized what he ha...
Binx’s search continues through his attraction to the movies that “are onto the search, but throw him further from the truth. The search always ends in despair” (13). The movies are a way for him to fill the emptiness in his life. They give him incite into others lives and into his own life. “Before I see a movie it is necessary for me to learn about something about the theater or the people who operate it, to touch base before going inside” (74). This helps him learn more about how others live and lear...
By embedding tragedies such as the corruption of J.B’s family, modernizing the true disposition of the Three Comforters, and renewing J.B’s ending along with his own aspect from the biblical story of Job, Archibald MacLeish has answered the question asked by the innocent, “Why do the righteous suffer?” After all, J.B becomes a stronger person than ever, because he overcomes his own obstacles and fear. The innocent has to suffer from the punishments from God in order to gain new experiences and to be more independent. Everyone has to suffer in order to be a better a person.
...ing identity to the point where it no longer exists. This identity can be lost through extreme devotion, new experience, and immense tragedy. Relationships with the most meaningful companions impact both main characters, Elie and Frederic. Due to the events they must encounter alongside loved ones, Elie and Frederic change completely, losing the identity that once existed. The most impactful events of any life are those that involve struggle and tragedy. Any tragic event that one encounters can significantly alter the purpose of life forever. Tragic events such as taking away what one may hold dearest, such as a loved one in the cases of Elie and Frederic. This type of loss can create a saddened, purposeless life in all humans.
Coming from a devout Catholic family, Gary Soto encountered the ultimate sin as a six-year-old when he was tempted by a delicious apple pie. But his guilt is expressed in more than just a frown; through his tremendous writing, Soto practically transforms his guilt into its own being. His attention to detail in each description demonstrates his ability to carry the reader through his writing, from the imagery behind his guilt sweat to the repetition of hearing the plumbing “howl”. In some ways, the readers themselves begin to feel guilty right alongside Soto. Written from the perspective of Soto’s childhood self, the story vividly details the sickening guilt that follows him after he steals an apple pie.
Despite not being considered as the traditional ‘hero’s journey’ which is outlined in Joseph Campbell’s argument of ‘separation-initiation-return’, Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine, in the 1942 film Casablanca, can be argued to follow this twelve-step journey. Campbell states “whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime…” (p.38), on this basis, Rick Blaine qualifies as a hero. These twelve steps are: Ordinary World; Call to Adventure/Disruption; Refusal of the Call; Meeting with the Mentor; Crossing the First Threshold; Tests, Allies, and Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave; Ordeal; Reward; The Road Back; The Resurrection; and Return with the Elixir. Although in some parts stages may overlap, this essay aims to argue that Casablanca still
Rudd, Jay. Critical Companion to Dante: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York. 2008. Print.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
External conflicts between the main characters, Cathy and Adam, reflect the idea of good versus evil in their relationship. Cathy, who is much like Satan, creates a huge fight between Adam and his brother Charles with her manipulations. Later, she ruins Adam's dreams and breaks his heart when she shoots him and leaves, sending Adam into a deep depression. After twelve years, Adam snaps out of his dream world and confronts Cathy. Cathy is now called Kate and works in a whore house called Faye's. Despite her actions, Adam realizes that he doesn't even hate Cathy for the hurt she has caused him. He finds peace with himself, renewing his once abandoned relationship with his sons.
Upon leaving Boston, the young man’s status and attitude change drastically. He becomes a captive of Crow Indians who treat him badly. He becomes property of a “...scrawny, shrieking, eternally busy old woman with ragged graying hair..” He must gain her trust to earn more freedom around the camp and such. During this time he was “...finding out what loneliness could be.”
The novel ‘of Mice and Men’ is about an unlikely pair of two migrant workers who cling together in the face of alienation and loneliness. George is small yet mindful and loyal, and lennie's is of incredible size and strength, yet he wields the small naive mind of a child. Even in his capaciousness, lennie has a peculiar obsession with small, fragile and soft things. He holds them so preciously and dear, unaware that he is simply too strong to handle these delicate creatures. Those small beings in which lennie's desperately tries to care for ever so quickly fade away, easily broken and stripped of their mere essence.
In conclusion, we can see that Dante presents the reader with a potentially life-altering chance to participate in his journey through Hell. Not only are we allowed to follow Dante's own soul-searching journey, we ourselves are pressed to examine the state of our own souls in relation to the souls in Inferno. It is not just a story to entertain us; it is a display of human decision and the perpetual impact of those decisions.
Moreover, Dante, the narrator of the Inferno, has succeeded in not only telling the frightening story of the Inferno, but also pointing out the importance of the relationship between human’s sins and God’s retribution, using the monsters as the symbols for each kind of sin and its punishment throughout the progress of the story, which teaches his readers to be well aware of their sins through the literature – a part of humanities; the disciplines that teach a man to be a human.
The Divine Comedy is a poetic Italian masterpiece by Dante Alighieri composed of three parts which he called respectively: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso. As this edition’s translator, John Ciardi puts it, originally Dante simply entitled his works as The Comedy, however, in later years, it was renamed The Divine Comedy for the connections that the public saw it had with human behavior and morality (Ciardi, 2003). For the goals and purposes of this review, we will focus specifically on the portion of the book called The Inferno. At a time when religious and secular concerns were at their peak in fourteenth century Italy, a tone of conflict broke out between the church and the government. Beyond the commonalities of corruption