Word: reader
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...conception of Judas as hero evolves, moreover, with what used to be called a fruitful ambiguity, leaving the reader to ponder the author's real intent. For while Judas begins as a humanist hero and Della Paresi is clearly a villain, it becomes progressively clear just how much Judas, the political revolutionary, and this unscrupulous priest resemble each other. They are both, in fact, unpleasant Ubermen-schen who see themselves as saviors of mankind but scorn all other men and other men's laws. Judas and Della Paresi agree that the meek will never inherit the earth...
This is the fourth novel to reach the U.S. by Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel laureate who committed suicide last April at the age of 72. American readers may find it the most rarefied so far. Besides displaying Kawabata's customary casualness about plot and characterization, it lacks the eroticism and cosmopolitan settings that helped make his Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) accessible to Westerners. Moreover, it requires at least a crude grasp of the technicalities of Go (for which a certain number of charts are provided). But in this book as in the Orient, a little...
...relatives lewis obtains group agreement (Ed is the deciding vote). In the book, the narrative progression is so lumps and Dickey's themes so muddled, that the some assumes importance not as another descending step into a home grown heart of darkness, but a thematic base for the reader to latch onto. When Drew later inexplicably keels over and out of his canoe, and drowns in a horrendous fall down a gorge's waterfall, we feel some innate moral order is rescuing this saint from this world and leaving the rest, bruised targets for the other stalking hillbilly, to their...
...complicated diagram of the heroic cycle. There are pauses in mid-text for the narrator to comment impatiently on the unsatisfactory progress of the narrative. Heroes from other Barth novels make cameo appearances, and halfway through Bellerophoniad, Barth presents an autobiographical account of his novelistic career. For the confused reader, he obligingly provides Robert Graves's summary of the details of the Bellerophon myth...
...failure to clearly portray individuals becomes extraordinary in light of a principal philosophical stance expressed by Solzhenitsyn. He argues that individuals especially through their personal incompetence have a personal force on history that Tolstoy excludes in War and Peace He makes this assertion in a direct comment to the reader, dropping any particular distance that an author might want to keep for the action of his novel, and contradicts Tolstoy by name in a short expository essay sitting roughly in the middle of the narrative...