There are many themes that occur and can be interpreted differently throughout the novel. The three main themes that stand out most are healing, communication, and relationships. Ordinary People starts off already in a broken world. Buck has died, and Conrad has already attempted suicide, therefore, healing is a main focus throughout the book. Beth and Calvin’s marriage is also very rocky and they together are trying to see if things will work out by healing and saving their relationship. Judith Guest shows the journey through Conrad’s life and his progress to becoming completely healed. Beth and Calvin’s relationship is also monitored and in the end just goes downhill by Beth leaving. Lack of communication and poor communication is a big problem in the novel. Beth thinks she and Conrad have poor communication. This is clear when Beth gets mad at Conrad be cause wasn’t the first to know that he quit swim team. Calvin and Beth have communication issues too. They always have different views on things. Beth wanted to go on vacation and Calvin thought it was best to stay home until Conrad is settled again. Calvin wants to talk about everyone’s problems when Beth feels it’s best to move on, and forget about the past and only think about the future. Their lack of communication to agree on things turns their marriage from good to bad and Beth ends up leaving Calvin and Conrad. Relationships are a major issue in the book. Beth and Calvin’s, and Calvin and Conrad’s are the two main relationships that have problems. First off, Beth and Calvin have a very poor relationship from lack of communication. They both have different views and the just really never click anymore. Calvin tries to go to Dr. Berger for advice and in the end their marriage crumbles and Beth leaves the family. Calvin and Conrad don’t have a very strong relation ship in the beginning because Calvin wants to sit around waiting for Conrad to heal and feels he‘s never good enough for Conrad, and Conrad just wants to go back to his regular life he had before and he also never really appreciated his dad.
We see in one part of the movie, Lila comes home and Justin had moved all of his brothers things out of the room that they had once shared together. Lilas reaction to this event was very brutal, she slapped her son Justin across the face after asking where he had put all of his brothers things. The death of Stephan had an effect on their relationship because I don't believe Lila really understood how hard it was Ion Justin and was only living in her own grief and mental
Ordinary People by Judith Guest is the story of a dysfunctional family who relate to one another through a series of extensive defense mechanisms, i.e. an unconscious process whereby reality is distorted to reduce or prevent anxiety. The book opens with seventeen year old Conrad, son of upper middle-class Beth and Calvin Jarrett, home after eight months in a psychiatric hospital, there because he had attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. His mother is a meticulously orderly person who, Jared, through projection, feels despises him. She does all the right things; attending to Jared's physical needs, keeping a spotless home, plays golf and bridge with other women in her social circle, but, in her own words "is an emotional cripple". Jared's father, raised in an orphanage, seems anxious to please everyone, a commonplace reaction of individuals who, as children, experienced parental indifference or inconsistency. Though a successful tax attorney, he is jumpy around Conrad, and, according to his wife, drinks too many martinis. Conrad seems consumed with despair. A return to normalcy, school and home-life, appear to be more than Conrad can handle. Chalk-faced, hair-hacked Conrad seems bent on perpetuating the family myth that all is well in the world. His family, after all, "are people of good taste. They do not discuss a problem in the face of the problem. And, besides, there is no problem." Yet, there is not one problem in this family but two - Conrad's suicide and the death by drowning of Conrad's older brother, Buck. Conrad eventually contacts a psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, because he feels the "air is full of flying glass" and wants to feel in control. Their initial ses...
One example of the theme occurs when the author first introduces the story. “But the summer I was 9 years old, the town I had always loved morphed into a beautifully heartbreaking and complicated place.” (pg. 1). The author is saying that the year she turned nine, she found out something about her town that broke her heart and changed the way she saw it. This quote is important because it supports the theme. It shows that now she is older she has learned something about her town that made her wiser than when she was younger. She is now more informed because the new information changed her and caused her to begin to mature.
Everyone viewed Conrad's mother, Beth, as perfect. Beth always had to have everything organized, neat. She had to be in control. Everything about her on the outside seems perfect. "Gracious as always, but Cal knows she doesn't like this. She is wearing a white-knit pantsuit, a long-sleeved black blouse, her hair tied back from her face with a black scarf. She does look gorgeous" (64). After her first son Buck died, and her second son Conrad tried to kill himself, she starts to realize that her family is falling apart, but she can't help them. Beth is all about appearance, how she and her family seem to other people. She can't handle talking about major problems, even when they involve the people she loves.
She is not able to talk about Buck or treat Conrad as Buck’s equal. It seems like after Buck’s death Beth is not willing to love and care for Conrad because of the emotional trauma she went through. There are a few scenes in the film that describes both her silence and violence well. The first one is when she is not willing to take a picture with Conrad when all the family gets together. She is very dismissive about it and tries her hardest to get out of taking the picture, a form of withdrawing. The ends up in a large argument between Beth, Conrad, and Calvin. A way she could have gone about this better is explaining why she does not feel comfortable with situation and using the C.R.I.B method. Beth should to talk to Conrad about what they both want and how they can come to a compromise. If the two together brainstorm ideas maybe they could have achieved a common goal. A way Beth exhibits violence is when she mentions to Conrad and Calvin that she found that Conrad had quit the swim team. She storms and starts to yell and accuse Conrad. This is called attacking. What Beth should of done is approach Conrad and speak to him respectfully and only state observable facts. Together they could have discussed the reason why Conrad quit the swim team and what needs to be done about
From the way we see ourselves versus how others see us defines who we are and creates our identity. In the film “Ordinary People”, each character molds into a different image of themselves after the loss of Buck, one of the sons out of the upper class family of four. Buck stabilized the family and the absence of him affects each member of the family in his or her own way. Misery, guilt, love, incapability to love, and anger are all revealed outside of the cookie cutter house as each character attempts to escape from the black hole they feel isolated in. Beth Jarrett, the mother, denies her brokenness and fabricates her smile to achieve the upper class role her mother imprinted on her as a child. Conrad, the other son, lavishes himself in self-guilt, blaming himself for the loss of his brother. He tries to re-establish his bruised soul but inflicts punishment before he allows himself to move on. Balancing the two broken identities, Calvin, the father, finds himself lost in Beth’s materialistic, expressionless world while trying to view the opposite
Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People evinces some main principles of the modernist literary movement, such as the philosophy that modern man is beset by existential angst and alienation. According to Carl Marx, a renowned existentialist, alienation, as a result of the industrial revolution, has made modern man alienated from the product of his own labor, and has made him into a mechanical component in the system. Being a "cog in the wheel" prevents modern man from gaining a sense of internal satisfaction of intellectual and emotional pleasure. Further more, according to Sigmund Freud, there are two pleasures, work and love. Consequently, Freud would say that being disconnected from pleasure from work, half of the potential for psychological fulfillment would be lost. Modern man is suffering from alienation as a result of large institutions, and as individuals, modern man neither feels that they are part of them nor can understand them. Additionally, the existentialists say, man is shut out of history. Modern man no longer has a sense of having roots in a meaningful past nor sees himself as moving toward a meaningful future. The modern man also suffers from alienation in his relationships with other people. Since he lives life not authentically and not knowing who he is, he cannot relate to others authentically. Hence, there are no real relationships at work and there are no real relationships of love. Also, according to Sartre, modern man is absolutely not a victim of his environments, of his childhood, and the circumstances in his life. The events in life are only neutral and since modern man is free, he chooses the meanings of the facts of his life. Modern man lives in a constant state of existential angst, which is dread of the nothingness of human existence and the fact there is no underlying purpose to human existence or set of objective truths or morals by which to navigate life. According to Martin Heideggar, German existentialist philosopher, the unaware person tries to escape the reality of death by not living life to the fullest. However, death can be the most significant moment for the individual, his defining moment of personal potential, if accepted and confronted squarely will free the individual from anxiety of death.
It travels back and forth several times in the book as Calvin goes through stages where he loves her more than anything and then other stages where he gets very frustrated with her and her selfish behaviors. A significant expression of this frustration is when Calvin and Beth argue over their vacation plans. In this situation, Beth was disregarding Conrad’s needs and Calvin's concerns and only thinking about what she wanted. Calvin then begins to show his anger when he comments to himself that “Self-possessed is what she [Beth] is...” (Guest 26). To add onto the previous idea about Calvin’s stages of emotions; I noticed that the negative emotions towards Beth become more frequent and intense as the novel progresses up until the point where Beth leaves. In comparison to the end of Ordinary People, the beginning starts off with Calvin always being overwhelmingly in love with Beth and seeing no faults in her. He describes his undeniable admiration of Beth: “Beautiful hair, the color of maple sugar. Or honey. Natural, too. The blue silk robe outlines her slender hips, her breasts (Guest 6). Guest hints at the possible weak and superficial relationship between Beth and Calvin in this fragment of Calvin thinking to himself. The superficiality is indirectly referenced by the fact that Calvin does not mention or notice one thing about Beth’s personality, but rather it is all focused on physical characteristics. This is subtle foreshadowing of the later downfall of this seemingly perfect
In the book Ordinary people by Judith Guest it shows how the book advocates for the therapist by Dr. Berger helping Conrad and his dad, Dr. Berger is there for him at all times, and Dr. Berger stays calm at all times.
Beth Jarret can be used as more of an indirect relation to this quote. Beth awoke one night to find Calvin missing from her bedside, when she went downstairs looking for him she found him sitting at the dining table crying. Calvin was upset at the fact that Beth fails to show affection for her son Conrad. Calvin stated “Its almost like you buried all of your love with Buck”. Calvin continued to explain how he has been thinking and he is not sure if he is in love with Beth anymore due to her actions. Guest uses very dramatic dialogue to develop the level of seriousness in this crucial conversation Calvin feels great pain over this situation but yet the sun rises the next morning only to bring an understanding between Conrad and Calvin.
Before I started reading the book, I started thinking of old themes in divergent that might cross over into this book. The major themes in the divergent book where nothing can stand in the way of a family with a close bond and your identity defines you and how people react to you. As I was reading Insurgent, I was reading with the intention of finding themes within the characters. I noticed that both themes in the book Divergent crossover and a new theme rose which was the theme of guilt is something we all live with and it can majorly affect our choices. I have noticed all of these themes several times within the book insurgent with mainly the characters Tris and Tobias(Also known as four).
For an abundance of authors, the driving force that aids them in creation of a novel is the theme or number of themes implemented throughout the novel. Often times the author doesn’t consciously identify the theme they’re trying to present. Usually a theme is a concept, principle or belief that is significant to an author. Not only does the theme create the backbone of the story, but it also guides the author by controlling the events that happen in a story, what emotions are dispersed, what are the actions of characters, and what emotions are presented within each environment to engage the readers in many
are all common themes that are represented at least once throughout the film. Glotfelty had stated
The most obvious of the themes is that of violence, brutality, and torture. Tied into this also is the idea of injustice. Many of these themes are intertwined. Constantly the reader is berated with violent images, or descriptions of violence. These must be on nearly every second page of the novel. A good example of all these themes together is in the section called “Moderate Pressure: Part Two” This deals with a story of a man called Ghassan who was accused of an affiliation with an illegal group that could not be proven. Ghassan was forced to stand or sit in certain positions for hours on end, he was beaten, deprived of sleep, and restricted from medical attention that he needed. Continually he went to court, and the case was adjourned to later dates to try to confiscate some kind of evidence against him. There was no justice for Ghassan until after several days (approximately 14); he was released for lack of evidence. Ghassan suffers from violence (which is unjust), from brutality (one of the inspectors trying to induce a heart attack), and torture. Ghassan’s ordeal is illustrated in both written and pictorial form. Likewise to this, there are many other pictorial examples and textual examples from front to back of violence, brutality, injustice, and torture .
According to Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of “culture” is “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”. On the other hand, accroding to Raymond Williams, it is more complicated. However, ther is something that is certain: Culture is ordinary, which happens to be the title of an article he wrote to define and explain what culture is.