Word: protagonists
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...protagonist and narrator, Thomas Theron, is a roustabout ne'er-do-well nihilist who also happens to be an associate professor of American Literature at a college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known as Wesley College. Soured by campus realities, and the realities of his own failed marriage, Theron has become a fugitive from anything serious...
...vehicle is David Treadup, born in upstate New York of staunch Anglo Saxon stock. Everything about Hersey's protagonist is perfect for the story he wants to tell. We follow Treadup's youth in the late 19th century, his early interest in science, his athleticism, and his growth to study, 6-ft., 4-in., 230-lb. menhood. Hersey clearly intends these introductory chapters to create a dominant image in the reader's mind of the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) impulses in American ideology which prompted the missionary wave almost a century...
Hersey's real story lies with the three major subdivision of Treadup, life after several years spent mastering Mandarin. He skillfully weaves the themes of Western knowledge and Christianity by having his young protagonist bring both to the Chinese at different point in his four-decade career. The science comes from a successful series of lectures throughout the vast country, the arts from two decades of literacy work. While ostensibly his mission was to proselytize. Treadup's Christianity shows most clearly after the Japanese invasion of Northern and coastal China at the end of his life. In different ways, however...
HERSEY uses the outbreak of World War I to deflate his protagonist, who is sent to serve as an interpreter for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese 'coolie' laborers on the Western Front (itself a revealing and sobering interlude in The Call). Upon his return to China we witness a less ambitious David Treadup, a man who treasures his knowledge of Mandarin more than his knowledge of science, which he has seen put to such horrible use by the Great Powers against one another. He embarks on almost two decades of literacy training in a small circle of villages near...
...does not by any means imply that Moore's stories are grim tragedies or soggy domestic confessionals, however much her plots be the stuff of such woeful fiction. What makes this remarkably self-assured first collection so interesting is the tough bitingly funny humor of the narrative voice. the protagonists, with the exception of the child narrator of The Kid's Guide to Divorce," are all young, college-educated. But this is a protective device, as the husband of the protagonist in another story. "To Fill" says "Everything's a joke. You're always flip-flopping words, only listening...