Word: protagonists
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Contrast is Desani's key philosophical concept. Make no mistake. All About H. Hatterr is a philosophical novel that deals, however obliquely, with such eternal conundrums as love, free will and appearance and reality. Its protagonist formulates no doctrines. But without ever quite losing his innocence, he does arrive at a visionary acceptance of all mortal matters as so much moonlight on the Ganges. "To hell with judging!" he concludes. "I have no opinions, I am beaten, and I just accept all this phenomena, this diamond-cut-diamond game, this human horseplay, this topsy-turvyism, as Life, as contrast...
...care so much what the good fight was, so long as it was waged with effortless style and nonchalance. While we could be embarrassingly sentimental, we were, paradoxically, distressed at open emotion. For us, coolness was all. Like Holden Caulfield, the confused but knowing teen-age protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye-the novel that became the decade's literary touchstone-we detested anything that we felt was phony...
Conveniently. Ken Russell's current film of Lawrence's Women in Love solves the problem quite neatly. Thanks to Larry Kramer's screenplay, which follows quite closely the plot of the novel, and thanks to Alan Bates's amusing but rather lightweight portrayal of Rupert Birken, Lawrence's protagonist and spokesman, the film turns poor old D.H. into the adolescent's adolescent. (Incidentally, someone along the assembly line was indiscreet enough to have Bates/Birklen wear a beard cut exactly like Lawrence's own. They seem to be daring us to make the connection.) And since (cautionary baritone) this film...
...principal personification of his distrust, his key corrective agent, as well as Grass's most famous character, is Oskar the dwarf, the protagonist of his first novel, The Tin Drum. The book sold more than 1,500,000 copies around the world (about 600,000 in the U.S.), as appalled and fascinated readers in 16 languages absorbed the dwarf's devastating, knee-high view of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Oskar's "sing-scream" could shatter glass. His magic drum carried him back and forth in time. One of his best tricks was breaking up Nazi rallies...
...reflects no real world, only the glints of its own inner harmonies. It is all a diabolical plot, and the first to be overthrown by it are the reviewers, for there is no way to describe it without giving away its secrets. It can only be said that its protagonist, a successful whodunit writer named Andrew Wyke (Anthony Quayle), is a witty snob who is inwardly delighted when a would-be lover makes a bid to divest him of his burdensome wife. Wyke sets out to ensnare his apparent dupe (Keith Baxter) in his own obsession with masks, disguises...