Word: protagonists
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...story is set in the late 1940s. told in the first person by Sal Paradise, a budding writer given to ecstasies about America, hot jazz, the meaning of life, and marijuana. The book's protagonist is Dean Moriarty ("a sideburned hero of the snowy West"), who has spent a third of his waking time in poolrooms, a third in jail, a third in public libraries, and is always shouting "Yes, yes, yes!" to every experience. Dean and Sal and their other buddies-Carlo Marx, the frenzied poet; Ed Dunkel, an amiable cipher; Remi Boncoeur, who has the second loudest...
...explorer. But beneath the surface, it is really a self-examining essay in which the continent's odd geography, zoology and climate serve as a metaphor for White's real theme-the uncharted journey into the dry, unblazed interior of the Australian mind. Landscape is the protagonist. It is said of one character: "His failures took shape, but in flowers and mountains." Another character speaks of "the grey of mediocrity" (the color of the Australian earth and foliage) and the "blue of frustration" (the color of the rainless skies), and these comprise the palette on which White works...
LOVE AMONG THE CANNIBALS, by Wright Morris (253 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.50), carries built-in advertising. At one point, the protagonist rhapsodizes: "Old lecher with a love on every wind, and you young ones too, running in pimpled packs after the teen-age bitch with her perfumed heat, and you, too, pretty matron, under the hair dryer, this is your book...
Like Graham Greene, Irish Novelist Hanley dotes on the guilt on the candelabra. He has given his protagonist the usual "failed-priest face," the customary taste for booze, and the symbolical death -Brennan falls from the height of Gaudi's grotesque unfinished Barcelona Church of the Holy Family. It is all pretty thick stuff, but an angry, eloquent passion against the paralyzing Red ticks in Europe's soft underbelly redeems it from mere melodrama...
...fair protagonist is a callow youth who was raised in what is euphemistically called a "house of illfame." And apparently finding his mother in bed with another man when he was a child so destroyed his values and trust in the world that he finds it necessary to stab people for entertainment to kill an old woman who had been kind to him in childhood, and in what seems to be the central scene of the film, exposes a sweet and innocent girl whom he loves and who loves him, lying prostrate and expectant, to another man. After this follows...