Word: protagonist
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Roth, 73, has said he was inspired to write Everyman by growing old, seeing friends die (including author Saul Bellow) and realizing that few novelists have written about the simple process of death. Everyman is essentially a medical biography. It begins at its end: the protagonist's burial in a rundown Jewish cemetery in New Jersey near his parents. It then returns to the beginning, cataloging his brushes with mortality--a drowned sailor washes up near his boyhood home during WWII, a burst appendix nearly kills him in his 30s--then jumps to his old age, a parade of annual...
...ancient idea: death renders us all the same. The protagonist sees those around him reduced to symptoms--an ex-wife felled by a stroke, a lady friend racked with back pain, an ex-colleague failing mentally. Roth is writing in the medieval tradition of memento mori--remember that you must die. (The novel's title comes from a Christian morality play about a visit from Death.) But Roth's protagonist rejects the "hocus-pocus" of God and Heaven. If he were to write his autobiography, he thinks, "he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body...
...problem is that in fiction, let alone life, the singular self does matter. Trying to make a Jersey boy who shares Roth's cultural background and birth year (1933) into an archetype, effacing his individuality, inhibits the reader from feeling the protagonist's loss emotionally, rather than just intellectually. (And denying him a name creates pronoun confusion whenever "he" talks to another man.) That Everyman's hero dies is universal. How he dies is not: he is alone, isolated from his brother, sons and ex-wives because of his traits and choices--often selfish, childish ones--but Roth has sketched...
...create a powerful and artistic piece of cinema. However, the reality created by the well-written and well-acted characters is ultimately undermined by too many self-consciously inventive film tricks.Much like the film itself, Harlan Fairfax Caruthers (Edward Norton), the movie’s drawling, gun slinging, cowpoke protagonist, is difficult to take without a grain of salt. The idea of a horseless, homeless cowboy roaming around the urban and suburban areas of the California central valley rightfully elicits some doubt and curiosity in the film’s cast of characters. Where defiant teen Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood...
...Saunders gives us perhaps the most explicit allegory of his vision of America’s slip down the slope toward war, following its misdirected push after 9/11—which he has discussed elsewhere in political essays. The protagonist, a nonspecifically small-town American father whose young daughter has been attacked and killed by a stray dog, moves from decking his town with FIGHT THE OUTRAGE posters to developing a “Three Point Emergency Plan” to sympathizing with his grieving wife’s demands: “Kill every dog, kill every cat?...