Modern Library

Nick Carraway – young man from Minnesota who goes to New York City to learn the bond business after attending Yale

Jay Gatsby – wealthy young man living in a large mansion in West Egg who is famous for lavish Saturday evening parties he uses to impress his old love Daisy

Daisy Buchanan – Nick’s cousin, and the object of Gatsby’s affection. Daisy remains with a husband that cheats on her and lets an innocent man take the fall for her poor choices

Tom Buchanan -Daisy’s wealthy husband, former classmate of Nick, former sportsman, and hypocritical bully.

Sociology of wealth

New money versus old money

Class

Love and marriage

Nick has social connections in East Egg, the more fashionable area of Long Island that is home to the established old money upper class. Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan,  is married to Nick’s former Yale classmate Tom. After Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a golfer, they begin to date.  Nick learns from Jordan about Tom’s affair with Myrtle Wilson, who lives in an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Tom meets Myrtle on a trip to New York City with Tom.  Tom responds to Myrtle’s taunting about Daisy by physically assaulting her, breaking her nose.

Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby’s parties. Nick meets Gatsby without initially realizing who he is.  He is surprised to meet a young man with a fake English accent and who refers to Nick as “old sport.” Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy when they both lived in Louisville in 1917.  Gatsby has been in love with her ever since.   He bought his house so he could stare at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby is trying to impress Daisy with his newly acquired wealth and he coopts Nick to invite Daisy to have tea at Nick’s house, where Gatsby will also be present. The two start a new affair.

Tom figures out that Daisy and Gatsby are having an affair when he catches how the two look at one another at dinner.  Tom doesn’t believe his wife should cheat even though he maintains a relationship with Myrtle. Tom confronts Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel with Nick and Daisy present. While Tom tells Gatsby that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could never understand, also telling Daisy that Gatsby is a bootlegger. Daisy resorts to her relationship with Tom, but Tom sends her back to Long Island with Gatsby.

Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive separately through the “valley of ashes”, and notice that Gatsby’s car has struck and killed Myrtle. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George later murders Gatsby because he believes that Myrtle must have been haing an affair with him.

Nick plans Gatsby’s funeral and hardly anyone attends.  After breaking up with Jordan, he moves back to the Midwest to escape the wealthy East Coast values.  Nick realizes that Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty just like the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into a mere pursuit of wealth. The American dream is over.

Eileen Vance (EV) – Stephen wants to marry her as a child but she is protestant.  Stephen’s mother assures he will apologize to Dante, a governess, or eagles will pull out Stephen’s eyes.

Pitfalls of religious extremism

Role of the artist – acting is a metaphor for living.

Need for Irish autonomy

Stephen has his first sexual experience with a Dublin prostitute and releases a storm of guilt and shame.  He tries to reconcile physical desires with strict Catholic morality.

Various sins are explored in the book, including masturbation, gluttony, prostitutes, etc.  On a three-day religious retreat, Stephen hears sermons about sin, judgment and hell.  He resolves to dedicate himself to a life of Christian piety.  He attends mass daily, becoming a model of Christian piety through abstinence and self-denial.  The Director of the school asks him to join the priesthood.

The austerity of the priestly life is incompatible with life for sensual beauty.  the family needs to move again for financial reasons.  While waiting for news about university acceptance, Stephen goes for a walk on the beach and observes a young girl wading in the tide.  He realizes in this moment of epiphany that love and desire of beauty should not bring shame.  He resolves to live life to the fullest and vows to not be constrained by boundaries of family, nation, and religion.

Stephen goes to university and develops strong friendships.  Cranly is Stephen’s close friend.  They discuss art together.  Stephen aims to create an independent existent, liberated from expectations of family and friends.  He decides to leave Ireland to escape his pressures.

Like Daedalus, Stephen builds wings to fly above all obstacles and achieves life as an artist.

A sheltered boy and bright student, innocence turns to debauchery, making him an unrepentant sinner who then becomes a devout Catholic.  He is fanatically religious at one point and then turns his devotion to art and beauty.

Lolita is neither beautiful nor charming.  She has freckles, skinny arms, vulgar language, and unladylike behaviors.  She is trapped and unable to free herself.  She doesn’t hold a grudge against Humbert or Quilty.  She exists only as an object of Humbert’s affection.

Quilty is not too different from Humbert.

Charlotte Haze – not as sophisticated and elegant as she things.  Religious and unimaginative, she writes letter with self-pitying martyrdom and melodrama.  She views her daughter Lolita as a threat.

incompatibility of European and American cultures

Inadequacy of psychiatry

Alienation caused by exile

The book begins with a foreword by a fictitious John Ray Jr., Ph.D., who received a manuscript from the author’s lawyer.  Said Lolita was also called the Confession of a White Widowed Male.  The novel would become a favorite in psychiatric circles as well as encourage parents to raise better children in a better world.

Humbert’s first love in the Riviera was Annabel Leigh at the age of 13.  Their love was never consummated because she died from typhus 4 months later.  Humbert is an English literature teacher who spends time in a mental institution

Despite his marriage to an adult woman, Humbert is fascinated with nymphets.  Humbert comes to the US and takes a room at Charlotte Haze’s house in a sleepy New England town.  Humbert is infatuated with Charlotte’s 12-year old daughter, Dolores, or Dolly or Lolita.

Humbert describes his attraction to Lolita in a journal.  Charlotte fell in love with Humbert and sent Lolita to summer camp, and Humbert and Charlotte marry while Lolita is away at camp.  Humbert considers killing Charlotte to be with Lolita.  Charlotte finds the diary and confronts Humbert, who denies everything.  Charlotte storms out with letters she has written about this situation and gets hit by a car and dies instantly.

Humbert picks up Lolita at summer camp and tells her (eventually) that her mother died.  Humbert claims that Lolita seduced him.  They drive across the country for a year, with Lolita increasingly manipulating Humbert.  Humbert threatens her with orphanage.  A strange man follows them in their travels.  Humbert gets a job at Beardsley College.  Lolita enrolls.  Lolita wants to socialize with boys, which causes issues with Humbert.  Humbert takes Lolita on another road trip and suspects that he is being followed.

Lolita becomes ill, goes to the hospital and escapes with her uncle.  Humbert searches for Lolita for two years.  He takes up a relationship with a woman named Rita.  Lolita eventually sends a note indicated that she is married and pregnant and needs money. Humbert assumes that her husband has kidnapped her.  Lolita is poor and pregnant at 17.

Lolita admits that Clare Quilty took her from the hospital.  He dumped Lolita when she wouldn’t participate in his child pornography orgy.  Humbert begs Lolita to leave with him but she refuses.  Humbert gives her $4000.  Hubert tracks down Quilty and shoots and kills him.  Humbert is arrested and put in jail where he writes his memoir, stipulating that it can only be published after Lolita’s death.  Lolita dies in childbirth, Humbert dies of heart failure, and the manuscript is sent to John Ray, Jr. Ph.D.

Lenina Crowne – abnormally, she likes to exclusively date.  She is attracted to John, but when she tries to seduce him, he attachks her.

Mustapha Mond – one of the ten world controllers.  He reads Shakespeare and the Bible and he used to be an independent-minded scientist, but he also censors new ideas and controls a totalitarian state. Mond believes that humankind wants stability and happiness, as opposed to emotions, human relations, and individual expression.

Bernard Marx – main character that is funny looking, strange, loveless and angry at his rivals until he returns from the reservation when he is more popular and then takes an interest in what he had previously criticized.

Helmholtz Watson – Bernard’s friend is too intelligent for his job writing hypnopaedic phrases.  He is well liked and respected.  Helmholtz is too strong, able to see and feel how the shallow culture in which he lives is stifling him.

John – a fair skinned man that is isolated from the rest of his savage village, largely the result of his mother Linda’s promiscuous behavior.  John’s extensive knowledge of Shakespeare’s works enables him to verbalize his own complex emotions and reactions and provides him with a framework from which to criticize World State values.

Linda – John’s mother who was ostacized for being too willing to sleep with men.

The book is a satire of society – the World State is simply an extreme version of our society’s economic values, in which individual happiness is defined as the ability to satisfy needs, and success as a society is equated with economic growth and prosperity.

An all-powerful state controls the behaviors and actions of its people in order to preserve its own stability and power.

Eventually, Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation in New Mexico, which the Director had visited 20 years ago (losing a woman that was never recovered).  On the reservation, residents are ill and aged and partake in religious rituals involving whipping themselves.  John and his mother Linda do not fit in on the reservation.  John has read only 2 books to which he has access – Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo and the Complete Shakespeare, which Pope (a lover of Linda) gave to her. John tells Bernard that he is eager to see the other place, the “Brave New World” that Bernard invites Linda to visit with him.  Mustapha Mond approves John’s and Linda’s entry.

While the Director had planned to ban Bernard to Iceland for his strange, difficult and antisocial behavior, he can’t when Bernard introduces Linda and John to him (because the Director is John’s father and Linda’s former lover).  Further, Bernard become more popular because everyone is excited to meet John.  But Bernard’s social standing again starts to plummet when John stops meeting guests.  Lenina becomes obsessed with John, who ultimately scares her after she tries to seduce him.  When John says that without art, science and religion, life is not worth living, he exiles himself to the countryside, where he self-flagellates.  John yells “kill it” when he sees Lenina and then hangs himself the next day.

Quentin Compson is a Harvard student telling his chapter in 1910

Jason Compson is a bitter farm supply worker speaking in April 1928.

Chapter 4 is told in the narrator’s voice, but is focused on Dilsey, the African American cook who raised the family.

Mental illness and suicide – if not for suicide, Quentin could have become a cynic like Jason or an idiot like Benjy.

Quentin is haunted by his family’s disintegration

Book is named after Macbeth-in a soliloquy, Macbeth implies that life is but a shadow of the past and that modern man is ill equipped and unable to achieve anything near the greatness of the past.

Corruption of Southern aristocratic values – self-absorption corrupted the core values these families once held dear and newer generations are unprepared for a modern world.

Resurrection and renewal – 1928 around Easter.  Crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday.  Benjy was born on Holy Saturday, same age as Christ (33)

Dilsey represents hope – she resurrects values that the Compsons long ago abandoned.

Endurance of love and family and religious faith.

Failure of language and narrative – the use of four narrators highlights the subjectivity of each narrative and casts doubt on the ability of language to convey truth or meaning absolutely.

Three Compson brothers are obsessed with their sister Candace (Caddy).  The book is written in 4 chapters, each with a different narrator in non-chronological order.

The Compsons are a prominent name in Jackson, MO.  Their ancestors settled the areas and defended it in the Civil War. The family’s wealth, land and status crumbled away.  Mr. Compson is an alcoholic.  Mrs. Compson is a self-absorbed hypochondriac who depends on Dilsey, the African American cook, to raise her four children.

Quentin is the oldest child. Caddy is a stubborn but loving and compassionate mother figure to Benjy and a symbol of affection to her brothers.  Jason has been mean spirited since birth.  Caddy is promiscuous, which torments Quentin and sends Benjy into fits of moaning and crying.

Mr. Compson sells land for Quentin to be able to attend Harvard.  Caddy loses her virginity and becomes pregnant and doesn’t know who is the father.  Quentin is shattered.  He falsely claims to be the father.  Mr. Compson knows better and is indifferent to Caddy’s promiscuity.  Caddy marries Herbert Head, a banker in Indiana. Herbert promises Jason a job in his bank bud rescinds the offer when he divorces Caddy.

Quentin commits suicide by drowning himself in the Charles River.  The Compsons disown Caddy, but take in Miss Quentin.  Mr. Compson dies from alcoholism 1 year after the suicide.  Jason becomes the head of the family and steals money that Caddy sends to support Miss Quentin’s upbringing.  Miss Quentin grows up to be an unhappy and rebellious and promiscuous girl constantly in conflict with her uncle Jason.

On Easter Sunday 1928, Miss Quentin steals several thousand dollars from Jason and runs away with a man from the traveling show.  As Jason chases Miss Quentin to no avail, Dilsey takes Benji and her family to Easter services.

• Aarfy – Yossarian’s navigator – he gets lost wherever he goes.
• Appleby – ping-pong player
• Captain Black – bitter intelligence officer that wants to be squadron commander.
• Chief White Halfoat – an alcoholic Native American from Oklahoma that decided he will die of pneumonia.
• Clevinger – believes strongly in concepts of country, loyalty and duty.
• Colonel Cathcart – officer in charge of Yossarian’s squadron that wants to be a general, so he volunteers his men for dangerous missions
• Colonel Moodus – General Dreedle’s despised son-in-law.
• Corporal Whitcomb – the chaplain’s assistant who hates the chaplain for holding back his career, so he causes him to be a suspect n the Washington Irving scandal.
• Dobbs – the copilot that takes controls from Huple during a mission to Avignon in which Snowden died.
• Doc Daneeka – a medical officer that is upset that war came between him and his lucrative private practice. He selfishly can’t relate to anyone else’s problems.
• Dunbar – Yossarian’s friend that likes boredom because it helps him to live longer with time passing more slowly.
• Ex-p.f.c Wintergreen – mail clerk who intercepts and forges documents, giving him lots of power.
• Flume – Chief Whit Halfoat’s old roommate that is afraid of having his throat slit while he sleeps so he sleeps in the forest.
• General Deedle – in charge of the squadron where Yossarian’s squadron is moved.
• General Peckham – ambitious operations general that plots to take over General Dreedle’s position.
• Havermeyer – a fearless lead bombardier.
• Hungry Joe – A member of Yossarian’s squadron that used to be a Life magazine photographer.
• Huple – a 15-year-old pilot that flew the mission to Avignon when Snowden was killed.
• John Yossarian is the protagonist and hero of the novel. A captain int eh Air Force and lead bombardier of his squadron, he despises war and avoids risking his life.  He concludes that millions of people are trying to kill him…he decides either to live forever or die trying.  Many of the men believe he is insane.  Self-preservation = heroism.  He genuinely cares for Snowden, realizing that concern for others complicates the logic of self-preservation.  Life is not worth living without a moral concern for the well-being of others, but a moral concern for the well-being of other endangers one’s life.
• Kid Sampson – a pilot
• Lieutenant Colonel Korn – Colonel Cathcart’s sidekick
• Lieutenant Sheisskopf – later a colonel and then a general (German for Shithead) who loves military parades.
• Lieutenant Sheisskopf’s wife – lover of all the men in her husband’s squadron, including Yossarian.
• Luciana – Yossarian falls in love with her in Rome
• Major __deCoverly – nobody knows his first name – he plays horse shoes and rents apartments.
• Major Danby – operations officer that used to be a college professor.
• Major Major Major Major – promoted to major his first day by computer. He invites people to his office only when he is not there.  He is actually quite lonely.
• McWatt – a pilot that jokes around with the planes, buzzing the squadron.
• Milo Minderbinder – a mess officer who controls an international black-market syndicate for food supplies. He chases after profit and bombs his own men to fulfill a contract he has with Germany.  Milo believes that everyone in the squadron can benefit from being part of the syndicate and the each of them has a share.  Through Milo, capitalism transcends political ideology.  Milo makes money off of anyone whether friend or enemy.
• Mudd – the dead man in Yossarian’s tent killed in action before he could be processed as officially. He is listed as never arrived.
• Nately – a 19-year-old in Yossarian’s squadron that falls in love with a “whore” in Rome.
• Nurse Duckett – a nurse in the Pianosa hospital that becomes Yossarian’s lover
• Orr – Yossarian’s roommate. He constructs improvements to the tent he shares with Yossarian.  He manages to survive many catastrophes.
• Snowden – his death over Avignon shattered Yossarian’s courage, he dies in Yossarian’s arms with insides splattered all over Yossarian.
• The Chaplain – Yossarian’s friend that experiences déjà vu and loses his faith over time.
• The soldier in white – a body complete covered with bandages I Pianosa hospital that terrifies Yossarian and Dunbar.
• Washington Irving – Yossarian signs letter as this American Author while in the hospital. The Army believes Washington Irving is the name of a covert insubordinate and criminal investigation inspects.
•  – Yossarian signs letter as this American Author while in the hospital. The Army believes Washington Irving ist he name of a covert insubordinate and criminal investigation inspects.

• Absolute power of bureaucracy
• Loss of religious faith
• Inevitability of death

Yossarian finds out that it is possible to be discharged from military service because of insanity. Catch-22 refers to a rule that says that one is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

Yossarian is in danger through no fault of his own.  He wants to live and spends a lot of time in the hospital avoiding war.  Yossarian flashes back periodically to Snowden’s death, remembering how he died in his arms.

Yossarian finally decides he will not fly any more missions after Nataly’s death.  He is arrested in Rom for not having a pass.  Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn offer him to be sent home with an honorable discharge if he approves of Cathcart and Korn and states his support for their policy, which requires all men in the squadron to fly eighty missions.  Complying means he would endanger others.  So, he deserts the army and flees to Sweden.

Number 402 is a Czarist army officer and veteran inmate with an archaic sense of personal honor.

Rip Van Winkle was driven to madness by 20 years of solitary confinement and further imprisonment

Interrogators are Ivanov (a comrade from Civil War and old friend) and Gletkin (a young man with starched uniforms that cracks and groans when he moves)

Transcendentalism – end justifies the means

Communism (brutality) versus simplicity and tradition of Christianity.

Moscow Confessions

The novel is set in 1939 during the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow Show Trials.  The party is the Soviet Government and the Dictatorship is Nazi Germany.  Joseph Stalin is “Number One”.

The book was written in German while Koestler lived in Paris in 1940. A copy was sent to Publisher Ewill Oprecht in Switzerland but was assumed to be lost until 2015, when it was discovered by a Doctoral candidate.  The new English translation was published in 2019.

The book makes reference to Job 5:14 “They meet with darkness in the daytime and grope in the noonday as in the night.”

Stalin was consolidating his dictatorship by eliminating potential rivals within the Communist party.

The book is broken into 4 parts, the First Hearing, the Second Hearing, the Third Hearing and Grammatical Fiction.

Rubashov is arrested in the middle of the night by two men from the Secret Police while Rubishov had recurring dream about when the Gestapo arrested him.  Old policeman is formal and the younger is brutal.  Passing of older civilized generation and barbarism of successors.

Rubishov communicates with Number 402 using tap code (ABCDE/FGHIJ/LMNOP/QRSTU/VWXYZ).

Rubishov, Ivanov and Gletkin speculate about historical processes and how individuals are affected by them.  History will absolve vile actions – the end justifies the means.  Suffering of a few thousand for the benefit of millions.

Gaining Socialist utopia will cause imposed suffering to be forgiven.

Rubishov is in a quandary – communism (brutality) versus simplicity and tradition of Christianity.

In 1933, Rubishov was to purge and reorganize German Communists.  Richard distributed material contrary to Party line and must be expelled.  Pieta – Christian imagery.

After released from imprisonment, Rubishov was sent to Belgium to enforce Party discipline among dock workers.

Little Lowey – sacrificed much for the Party, but is still dedicated.  He hangs himself when the party denounces his cell by name.

Ivanov was an old Bolshevik – Rubishov convinced him not to commit suicide when his leg was amputated.

Rubashov can lessen his sentence to 10 years by confessing instead of execution, but he won’t cooperate.

Charges are not discussed because they are not relevant.

Gelkin urges harsh physical methods.

Michael Bogrov, a one-time distinguished revolutionary naval commander is to be executed.  Prisoners drum on walls to signal brotherhood.

Bogrov execution is orchestrated by Gleken to weaken Rubishov’s resolve.

#402 and Rubashov argue about honor.

Ivanov was executed.

Rubishov confesses to false charges.  Thinks about how he betrayed Richard the young German, Little Lowey in Belgium, Orlana his mistress secretary.  He is ultimately treated with the same ruthlessness.

Rubishov confesses to these false charges publicly.

Final section – “show us not the aim without the way” by Ferdinand Lasalle.

Novel ends with Rubishov’s execution.

• Gertrude Morel – a sophisticated woman married to a drunken miner Walter Morel who mistreats her after their earlier years together when the two had fun and danced. She is a very controlling mother.
• Walter Morel – an uneducated and hardened miner who drinks too much and doesn’t take fatherhood seriously enough.
• William Morel – the oldest and favorite of the Morel children. He takes a job in London, falls for a spoiled and shallow woman (who treats the Morels like servants), gets sick and ultimately dies a few years later.
• Paul Morel – the second son and object of Gertrude’s affection but only after William dies. He also nearly dies from pneumonia.
• Annie Morel – the second child who plays a greater role at the end of the book when she helps to give a dying Gertude morphine.
• Arthur Morel is the youngest brother who plays a minimal role in the tory after he is sent off to school.
• Miriam Leivers – a family friend and farmer neighbor that has a platonic relationship with Paul for years, much to the disapproval of Gertrude. After Gertrude dies, Miriam begs Paul to be together but he chooses to be alone instead.
• Carla Dawes – a suffragette separated from her husband that met Paul through Miriam. She encourages Miriam to have a relationship with Paul despite taking an interest in him too.  They have an affair, putting Carla in a situation of choosing between Paul and Baxter.
• Baxter – husband of Carla Dawes who ends up becoming enemies and then friends with Paul

Abusive relationships

Childhood, adolescence and clash of generations

Expression and lack of love

William, is Gertrude’s favorite, and she takes it as a personal affront when he accepts a job in London and is introduced to higher income and a new class of people interested in him.  William gets sick and dies, and Gertrude hardly notices that one of her children Paul also becomes sick and nearly dies.  Without William around, Paul becomes the new object of Gertrud’s affection.

When Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers, from a neighboring farm, they have a very close but platonic relationship.   Miriam is never accepted by Mrs. Morel, which largely serves a the reason Paul doesn’t pursue is interest in her.

Miriam introduces Paul to Clara Dawes, a suffragette who is separated from her husband.  After Clara encourages Paul to pursue Miriam, Paul and Miriam sleep together and are briefly happy, but shortly afterward Paul decides that he does not want to marry Miriam.

Paul then spends more time with Clara and they begin an extremely passionate affair. However, she does not want to divorce her husband Baxter.

Miriam begins to get ill and Paul takes care of her.  After she dies, Paul decides that he prefers to be alone.

• Geoffrey Fermin is an alcoholic British Consul in a Mexican town of Quauhnahuac.  He was a naval officer in WWI.  he was decorated for actions aboard submarine destroyer where German officers were burned alive in a boiler.  He was appointed to Consular Service.
• Yvonne is a former actress with a career in movies starting at age 14.  She had affairs with both Hugh and Jacques Laruelle.
• Hugh is the half-brother singer/songwriter that supports Republicans in Spanish Civil War, visits Mexico to report on Fascist activity for the London Globe.  He is leaving the next day to board a ship bringing ammunition to Spanish government forces.
• Jacques Laruelle is a French film director, and childhood friend of the Consul.  He had an affair with Yvonne and didn’t get over her.

In Chapter 1, on November 2, 1939, Jacques Laruelle and Dr. Vigil drink anisette at the Hotel Casino de la Selva on a hill above Quauhnahuac.  They discuss the Consul’s alcoholism, his unhappy marriage, and his striking wife named Yvonne.  When the Consul and Laruelle were very young, Lauruelle spent the summer season with the Consul’s adopted family, the Taskersons, who had hard-drinking sons.  He stayed at their summer cottage on the English Channel.  Laruelle receives a book he borrowed a year and half prior from Consul – Elizabethan plays for Faustus myth film, finding a desperate letter from the Consul to Yvonne, containing a plea to return.  Laruelle burns the letter.

In Chapter 2, the Consul is at a bar at 7:00 a.m. after a Red Cross Ball.  Yvonne enters and wonders if the Consul can return from stupid darkness.  They stop and Laruelle’s house and in the Garden see a sign that reads No Se Puede Vivir Sin Amar.  One cannot live without loving.  Hugh is also in town.  A pariah dog follows them into the garden.

In Chapter 3, the garden is in chaos.  The Consul visits the Cantina and falls down in the street and is almost run over by an English MG driver.  The Consul’s unsuccessful attempt at making love to Yvonne symbolizes his impotence and despair, as all he seems to think about is a bottle of Johnny Walker that he knows is outside.  He murmurs “I love you” to the bottle of whiskey.

In Chapter 4, Hugh’s point of view is known.  His clothes were impounded and he puts a news dispatch inside the consul’s jacket pocket that he has borrowed from the Consul.  Hugh’s friend Juan Cerillo is a Mexican that was in Spain with Hugh.  Hugh had past affair with Yvonne.  Hugh and Yvonne go on a horse ride together.

In Chapter 5, in the garden, the Consul has visions of Farovita, a bar in Parian.  Instead of Dr. Vigil’s offer of a day trip to Guanajuato, they decide instead to go to Tomalin, near Parian.

In Chapter 6, Hugh ruminates upon his career as a sailor.  He is a journalist and a musician.  He considers himself responsible for Battle of Ebro.  In the past, Hugh was trying to be a musician-Bolowski was his hired publisher.  Bolowski didn’t publish his songs.  Hugh sleeps with his wife. Bolowski then sues Hugh for plagiarism.  A postcard arrives from Yvonne one year before when she traveled the world.

In Chapter 7, the scene changes to Jacques Laruelle’s home.  The Consul is looking for his copy of Eight famous Elizabethan plays.  Consul gets drunk while Laruelle counsels him on his drinking.  Consul takes ride at a carnival called the “Infernal Machine” and loses his possessions.  He has a drink at the Terminal Cantina el Bosque, where a pariah dog follows him in and then leaves.

In Chapter 8, Consul, Yvonne and Hugh travel to Tomalin by bus.  Hugh notices a dead dog at the bottom of a barranca.  A pelado is on the bus. Hugh spots a man in the road asleep.  The man is actually an Indian who is dying rather than sleeping.  Nobody helps him because the law makes good Samaritans liable as an accessory.  The Pelado from the bus stole money from the Indian and used it to pay his bus fare.

In Chapter 9, Arena Tomalin is the location of a bullfight.  Yvonne discusses her life as an actress in Hollywood.  She had dreamed of a future she would like to have with the Counsel in Canada in peace with nature.  Hugh then jumps into the bullfight as the Consul and Yvonne profess their love to each other.

In Chapter 10, the Consul has drinks at the Salon Ofelia.  The Consul leaves dinner party after arguing politics with Hugh and lashing out at Yvonne’s and Hugh’s concerns about his drinking.

In Chapter 11, Hugh and Yvonne search for the Consul.  They must choose one of paths, choosing the one with 2 cantinas on it on the way to Parian.  Yvonne is trampled by a horse with the #7 on it and imagines seeing her dream house in Canada burn down as she dies.

In Chapter 12, the final number on a clock.  The Consul is talking to a man from Farolito.  Diosdado (the Elephant) hands the Consul a stack of letters written by Yvonne.  Consul gets into a disagreement with local police chiefs, who discover Hugh’s papers in the Consul’s jacket.  They push him outside the bar, shoot him, and push him off a ravine.  The shot startled the horse that ran off and trampled Yvonne.  A dead dog is then thrown in the ditch with the Consul

• John Pontifex is the oldest ancestor covered in the book, born in the 1720s. He constructs an organ and has a variety of skills…master of none but adept at many.
• Ruth Pontifex is the wife of John Pontifex. She is said to have been John’s master, didn’t come from lots of money, and her husband “bowed before her stormy moods.”
• George Pontifex is the son of John and Ruth Pontifex. He marries, but the name of his wife is not mentioned in the book.  He was fond of his parents, but nobody else really.  He makes his way into his uncle’s (Mr. Fairlie, his mother’s sister’s husband) good graces as a teenager and eventually joins the publishing business (primarily religious works) after living with his aunt and uncle in London.
• Eliza and Maria Pontifex and Georges’ eldest children, who never marry.
• John Pontifex is George’s third child who marries but has an unnamed son years after Theobold has a son.
• Theobald Pontifex is George’s fourth child and second son who marries Christina Allaby, later having 3 children. He becomes a minister under pressure from his father.
• Christina Allaby Pontifex eventually married Theobold, largely the result of her Mother’s forcing the situation. She played a card came with her sisters to determine which of the sisters would pursue Theobold for marriage.  As the second unmarried daughter at 27 years old, Christina was four years older than Theobold, and her sisters thought it was throwing a husband away to let her try and catch him for she was older and shouldn’t have much of a chance.
• Alethea Pontifex is George’s fifth child who loves Overton, the narrator, but never marries him. Her mother dies in childbirth when she is born.  She was her grandfather’s favorite grandchild. She comes to inherit money from her parents and has no heirs to leave the money, sending her on a quest to get to know and bond with her nephew Ernest.
• Ernest Pontifex is the main character, the oldest son of Theobald & Christina Pontifex.
• Dr Skinner is Ernest’s teacher.
• John is Theobald & Christina’s coachman who is later found to be the father of Ellen’s illegitimate child. John marries Ellen but leaves her when he discovers her drinking problem.
• Ellen is Ernest’s wife and former housemaid for Theobald & Christina; pregnant by John the coachman who she wed in 1851, separated; and then became a bigmist when she married Ernest. She has drinking problems and eventually leaves for America.
• Joseph and Charlotte Pontifex are the children of Theobald & Christina, with Joseph becoming a minister like his father and Charlotte marrying later in life after being bitter with her brother for not presenting her more opportunities to find suitors.
• Alice and Georgie Pontifex are the illegitimate daughter and son of Ellen & Ernest.
• Mr Edward Overton is the the narrator who loved Alethea Pontifex but never married her.  He serves as the trustee of Althea’s estate.  He is also Ernest’s godfather

Money is the root of all evil.

Victorian Snobbery.

Abusive relationships, particularly physical and emotional abuse of Ernest by Theobold.

The book mostly focuses on Ernest and his hypocritical and controlling parents. His aunt Alethea dies before she can influence Ernest’s life and help him come out from under his parents’ constant pressure.  Before dying, Althea arranges for Overton to serve as an executor responsible for keeping a small fortune for Ernest to be turned over when he turns twenty-eight.

While Ernest starts out as an Evangelical Christian minister, he then is influenced by a fellow clergyman who not only convinces him to pursue a different religious sect, but also steals his money from his parents.  He decides that he want to live among the poor, but he begins to lose his faith in the Bible and ultimately attempts a sexual assault on a woman he incorrectly believes lacks morals.  He ends up serving a prison term. His parents disown him. And his health later deteriorates.

As he recovers in prison, he learns how to tailor clothing and decides to become a tailor once he gets out of prison. After losing his faith, he marries Ellen, a former housemaid of his parents.  They have two children and set up a second-hand cloting shop.  Ernest discovers that not only is Ellen a bigamist, but she is also a terrible alcoholic. Overton pays Ellen an allowance to keep her away from Ernest, but Ernest isn’t a successful tailor without her.  Ellen later leaves for America. Overton hires Ernest as a bookkeeper to teach him how to be responsible with money.  Together Overton and and Ernest go on a trip through Europe.

When Ernest turns 28, he receives his aunt Alethea’s money. His parents request that he return home to visit his dying mother.  Ernest becomes a successful author of controversial literature by pretending that the opposing viewpoints are written by multiple knowledgeable people that are secretly stating their positions (scientists, versus ministers, etc.).

Julia – in love with Winston Smith and similarly hates the Party.

O’Brien – powerful member of the Inner Party who tricks Winston into believing that he is a member of the revolutionary group called the Brotherhood.

Mr. Charrington – a widower, owner of a second-hand shop in the prole district of London, and a member of the Thought Police.

Totalitarianism – control of information and history, independence, and identity.

The Claudian line has “good apples” and “bad apples”, but most seem to be bad except for Claudius and a few other characters (most of whom support a Roman republic).  Livia, Claudius’ grandmother and the wife of Augustus (first Emperor of Rome), is one of the worst “bad apples”, killing many people to get what she wants throughout the novel.  Through her manipulation, Augustus takes power and becomes king, although he is really a republican at heart.  Livia claimed she was pregnant by Augustus to convince him to marry her, divorcing Claudius’ actual grandfather (the true father of the unborn child).  Claudius’ father was raised with his natural father and brother Tiberius, but he mysteriously dies (poisoned by Livia) suddenly after teaching the boys about a republic.

Livia and Augustus never consummate their marriage, and she uses his guilt about this fact to control him.  She is very vocal about her thoughts regarding the heir he will eventually need to name.  When Augustus favors Marcellus, the husband of his daughter Julia, Livia creates a sort of struggle between Agrippa (Augustus’s dearest friend) and Marcellus.  After Marcellus started to take on more important roles, Livia poisoned him causing his death.  She intends for Julia to marry her son Tiberius, giving him a better chance at being an heir, but Augustus instead agrees for Julia to marry Agrippa.  Eventually, Livia also has Agrippa killed, and Julia must then marry Tiberius (her third marriage after deaths of two husbands at Livia’s hands), a step-son that Augustus never even liked.  Tiberius himself did not want to marry Julia because he was in love with his wife Vipsania, but Julia loved Tiberius since they were children and he married her anyway (to carry out his mother’s plan).

Livia intercepts a letter from Claudius’ father to Tiberius in which he explains the problems with the current system of government. The letter is also critical of Livia, so Livia ultimately kills him too.

If it wasn’t enough that Claudius’ grandmother Livia was rotten to Claudius, so was his own mother Antonia, who views him as a worthless idiot.  Ironically, when Claudius was 8 years old, he caught a wounded wolf cub that fell from the sky after several eagles fought for it overhead, prophesying Claudius’ eventual destiny as a protector of Rome.  As a boy, Claudius enjoyed the company of his brother, Germanicus, and Julia’s son, Postumus, both of whom protected him from the cruel treatment by the rest of the family.  Athenodorus, a philosopher, became another friend of Claudius, teaching him the skills of a historian and helping him to control his stuttering when public speaking.

As the story continues, Livia gives Julia a “love philtre” (an aphrodisiac intended to help her relationship with Tiberius) which instead causes Julia to become very promiscuous with just about anyone.  Livia agrees to allow Tiberius to leave Rome, exacerbating Julia’s behavior with many different men. Eventually Julia becomes so reckless that Augustus chooses to banish her for life, much to the satisfaction of Livia.  While Tiberius is away, Augustus starts to grow closer to Julia’s son’s Gaius and Lucius, making them a threat to Tiberius as possible heirs.  After a few months, they both die mysteriously (yes, Livia again). Augustus requests that Tiberius return to Rome, where he and Postumus will likely become Augustus’ sons and heirs.

Claudius gives more details about his childhood, telling a story about his first engagement at age 13.  While Livia wanted Claudius to marry Aemilia, Augustus decides to marry Claudius to Medullina Camilla, the granddaughter of one of Augustus’ generals.  Claudius was in love with her and was devastated when she was stuck with a poison needle, dying on the day of the wedding.  Livia then had second thoughts about Aemilia because her parents could get in the way of Tiberius becoming the sole successor, so she accused the parents of treason and broke off the engagement.  Livia then agreed to marry Claudius to her friend Urgalania’s ugly daughter, Urgulanilla as a private joke.  The mothers laugh at the horrible sight of the two of them together.  The marriage is somewhat successful because the two of them are indifferent to one another.  They have a son Drusillus.

To ensure that there are no further threats to Tiberius becoming the next emperor, Livia arranges for the deaths of Lucius, Gaius, and Camilla while preventing Julilla, Aemilius, and Julia from becoming a threat.  Claudius isn’t viewed as a threat, which is what protects him from being killed off like his relatives.

As Claudius was growing up, he interacted with two important historians, Livy and Pollio, whom he respected for their literary style and accuracy, respectively.  The historians are impressed by Claudius’ intellect while most people think of him as an idiot.  Pollio tells Claudius to exaggerate his limp and stuttering and playing the fool to keep himself alive!

Becaue Livia views Postumus as a threat to Tiberius, she devises a way to remove Postumus as an obstacle so that Tiberius will be a sole rule of Rome.  Postumus tells Claudius that he has been banished because he has been accused of raping Livilla, Claudius’ sister. Livilla was involved in a scheme with Livia.  Postumus was then caught and banished to a small island in the Mediterranean.

Germanicus tells Augustus about the truth behind Postumus’ so-called rape of Livilla, and Augustus exchanges Postumus for a slave that takes his place. When Livia discovers the plot, she starts to poison Augustus’ fig tree – the only thing he will eat because he believes it is safe to do so.  After Augustus’ death, Tiberius needs Senate support.  Germanicus gives Tiberius his full support.

The Roman regiments stationed in Germany began to mutiny in protest of the limited funds they had received in Augustus’ will. Germanicus gets them under control by forging a letter from Tiberius agreeing to double their funds.  Tiberius is envious of Germanicus and suspects him (incorrectly) of wanting to be Emperor.  Sejanus, the Commander of the Guards, becomes Tiberius’ close ally and convinces Tiberius that Germanicus can’t be trusted.

Claudius begins a relationship with Calpurnia, a kind-hearted prostitute who becomes his companion and one true friend for the next several years.  Claudius receives a secret message from a beggar that he knows is from Postumus.  When Tiberius learns that Postumus is in Rome attempting to gain support against him and Livia, Sejanus’ soldiers ambush Postumus and his supporters, and Tiberius has Postumus beheaded. Claudius realizes that his letters were  intercepted by Tiberius and Livia.

After Germanicus tells Tiberius about all of Livia’s plots, Tiberius tells Livia .  Germanicus suddenly falls ill and becomes convinced that his illness is the result of witchcraft. Caligula was responsible for his father’s death by using  fear and superstition to drive his father mad and essentially frighten him to death.

Livia grows unpopular because people suspect her of her wrongdoing. Tiberius grows more suspicious of his relatives at Sejanus’s urging.  When Vipsania dies, Tiberius begins perverted sexual exploits that make him an even more despicable figure.

With Germanicus’ death, Sejanus tries to get more power by suggesting that his daughter and Claudius’ son marry.  Livia has Drusillis strangled to prevent Sejanus from getting closer to the imperial family.

Sejanus and Livilla plot to become emperor and empress by plotting the deaths of Germanicus’ sons Nero, Drusus, and Caligula, each of which was a potential heir to Tiberius. Sejanus again tries to  join the imperial family through marriage by suggesting that  Claudius divorce Urgulanilla to marry Sejanus’ adopted sister, Aelia. Livia and Tiberius become estranged.

On her birthday, Livia invites Claudius to dine with her. Claudius overcomes his fear of Livia when she tells him that Caligula will become emperor and Claudius will avenge his death. Livia then begs Claudius to promise that he will make her a goddess and she then tells him about all of the smurders that she has committed over the course of her life.

Tiberius declares Caligula as his heir but continues to honor Sejanus with high political positions. Tiberius deceives Sejanus and orders his execution.

At Antonia’s request, Tiberius allows Antonia to determine Livilla’s punishment, and Antonia locks Livilla in her room until she starves to death. For the next five years of his reign, Tiberius continues in the same vein of paranoia and random execution. Nero, Agrippina, Drusus, and Gallus all die during their imprisonment. Caligula becomes Tiberius’ closest friend and they enjoy common sexual vices that bind them.

At seventy-eight years old, Tiberius becomes increasingly feeble but unwilling to admit that he may be in poor health. Caligula orders Macro to smother to death.

Caligula falls ill with a “brain fever” and is feared to be near death after several years as a successful emperor.  The illness makes him go insane and he begins to believe that he is undergoing a physical metamorphosis and becoming a god. Caligula banishes Lesbia and Agrippinilla on the charge of adultery, only after he constructed a brothel in the palace and sold sexual favors from Lesbia and Agrippinilla to help Rome’s money problems. Caligula’s madness continues until he is assassinated by Cassius Chaerea and several other soldiers at the Palatine Festival. The assassins also murder Caligula’s most-recent wife, Caesonia, and their young daughter, Drusilla.

Claudius tries to hide in the midst of the riot but is discovered by a group of soldiers. Instead of killing him, as Claudius expects, the soldiers proclaim him emperor. Claudius realizes that the omen of the wolf cub and the Sibyl’s prophecy have finally come true.

Mr. Ramsay – husband of Mrs. Ramsay who is a prominent metaphysical philosopher that had his finest achievements early in life and tries to continually improve as he ages. He seems selfish and harsh because he wants to be remembered, constantly fearing that his work is insignificant. While he loves his family, his need for constant sympathy and attention drives his wife, children and guests crazy.  His children often feel criticized by their father, seldom receiving any compliments or encouragement.

Lily Briscoe – A young friend of the Ramsay’s who fears that her painting lacks worth, largely the result of men like Charles Tansley who think that women cannot paint or write.  Her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, while started at the beginning of the book, is not completed until the end of the book, long after Mrs. Ramsay’s passing.

James Ramsay – The youngest of the Ramsay’s children, he has an Oedipal complex causing him to compete with Mr. Ramsay for Mrs. Ramsay’s affection.  In the third section of the book, James, Cam and Mr. Ramsay finally go to the lighthouse that James so badly wanted to visit in the first section (when he was 6 years old).  By this time, he has grown into a moody young man who has much in common with his father, whom he detests.

Paul Rayley –  a young and kind young man who follows Mrs. Ramsay’s wishes in marrying Minta Doyle.  He turns out to be a mean husband.

Minta Doyle – a female guest of the Ramsays who marries Paul Rayley after Mrs. Ramsay puts Paul up to asking her to marry him.

Charles Tansley – A pupil of Mr. Ramsay who is insecure, so much so that he must insult others (like Lily) to feel better about himself.

William Bankes – An older botanist who Mrs. Ramsay tries to set up with Lily Briscoe, although the two remain good friends.

Preservation – Only Lily Briscoe finds a way to preserve her experience, and that way is through her art. Mrs Ramsay’s social interations and Mr. Ramsay’s intellect will eventually be forgotten.

The Ramsays host a number of guests, including Charles Tansley, Lily Briscoe, William Bankes, Paul Rayley ,and Minta Doyle.  On the day of a dinner party that Mrs. Ramsay hosts, Paul proposes to Minta, Lily begins her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, and Mr. Ramsay displays his insecurities. Lily also takes offense to Charles Tansley’s suggestions that women can neither paint nor write. Even with all the commotion, the guests have a great dinner party.  This section ends when night falls, all events taking place the same day.

In “Time Passes”, the second section, 10 years are summarized.  Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly as do the children with the most promise (Andrew a young man adept at mathematics dies in battle and the beautiful Prue dies from an illness stemming from childbirth). The vacation house is not visited throughout the 10 years and the house falls into a bad state.  Mrs. McNab, the family’s housekeeper, gets the house back together in time for the next section of the book.

In “The Lighthouse” section, time slows down again.  Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam finally visit the lighthouse. Before leaving, Mr. Ramsay hovers around Lily as she is trying to continue her painting of Mrs. Ramsay.  She does not budge when he seeks her sympathy, only discussing his nice boots.  James and Cam come around after being annoyed by their father’s self pity after Mr. Ramsay praises his son’s sailing abilities.  Lily finally completes her painting, finally having achieved her vision.

• Clyde Griffiths is the central character of the novel, the one whose progress we follow throughout the novel.
• Gilbert Griffiths – Clyde’s cousin
• Roberta Alden – Clyde’s lover while employed as a manager in his uncle’s factory. Clyde kills Roberta, ensuring that her pregnancy will not spoil his chances with Sondra Finchley
• Sondra Finchley – the object of Clyde’s desire from a wealthy family.
• Orville Mason – district attorney, who ensures that Clyde is convicted
• Duncan McMillan – reverand that doubts Clyde’s innocence

• oral and physical cowardice
• lack of scruple and self-discipline
• muddled intellect
• unfocused ambition

Clyde ends up in Chicago where he is working as a bellboy and meets his biological uncle Samuel Griffiths (brother of Clyde’s father), who invites Clyde back to Lycurgus, NY.  Samuel gives Clyde a job in his collar factory, but the job is not one that gives him the status he is looking for.  As a common laborer in the shrinking room, it takes Clyde time to be promoted to manager of the stamping department.  Even though his cousin Gilbert warns him to stay away from the women in the office, Clyde seduces Roberta Alden, a farm girl from a nearby town.  She ultimately is pregnant.

At the same time, Sondra Finchley, a daughter of another Lycurges factory owner, becomes interested in Clyde even though Gilbert tries to keep them apart.  Clyde neglects Roberta, who expects Clyde to marry her so she can avoid the shame of  unwed pregnancy.  But Clyde is much more interested in Sondra than his obligations to Roberta.

While Clyde intended to kill Roberta at Moon Cove on Big Bittern, he finds himself unable to murder  her.  When Roberta touches Clyde, she catches him by surprise and makes him angry.  He unintentionally lashes out at her, knocking her over and tipping the boat. He then lets Roberta drown to death, as he originally planned.

When Roberta’s body is discovered and Clyde is caught, put on trial, and sentenced to be executed. Clyde has a chance at escaping the death sentence through the intervention of a Reverend, Duncan McMillan, but McMillan has doubts about Clyde’s innocence and allows the execution to take place.

• The narrator – symbolically not named.  He develops as an individual throughout the book, but he considers himself invisible because people never see his true self beneath the roles that stereotypes and racial prejudice play.
• Brother Jack – The white and blindly loyal leader of the Brotherhood, a political organization that professes to defend the rights of the socially oppressed
• Ras the Exhorter – represents the black nationalist movement, which advocates the violent overthrow of white supremacy
• Dr. Bledsoe – the president at the narrator’s college, who is selfish and awful to the narrator, sabotaging his chances at a future.

Racism is an obstacle to the narrator’s identity.

Other’s errant behavior is what leads the narrator to fulfill their misguided expectations.

Vulnerability to identity that thrusts him into a role as an African American man.

One must define oneself against society’s expectations.

As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, he lived in the South.  As a gifted public speaker, he was invited to give a speech in town.  His reward was a briefcase and a scholarship to a prestigious black college where he must fight in a battle royal (fist-fighting other black men in blindfolds).  Later, he fights in an electrified ring where he and others fight for coins that each contestant scrambles to collect (they actually have no value).

In a dream, the narrator describes a paper saying “to whom it may concern…keep this ni**** boy running.”

Three years later, he drives a trustee Mr. Norton around campus.  Norton takes an interest in Jim Trueblood – a poor black man that had an incestuous relationship with his daughter, causing her pregnancy.  Norton needs a drink so the narrator brings him to Golden Day, a saloon/brothel.

Reverend Homer Barbee gives a long sermon honoring one of the University’s founders.  Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, then chastises the narrator for taking Mr. Norton to slave quarters and the Golden Day.  He should have shown the white man an idealized view of blacks.

Narrator is expelled with seven letters addressed to white trustees to look for a job in New York City.  The narrator goes to Harlem, but has no success in his job hunt, because the letters effectively told the trustees not to hire him.  The letters portray the narrator as unreliable and dishonorable.  Young Emmerson helps the narrator get a low paying job at the Liberty Paints Plant.  Their trademark color is “Optic White”.  Narrator is an assistant to Lucius Brockway, an anti-union man.  The narrator is knocked unconscious when  a tank explodes.  In a hospital at the factory, a white doctor conducts electric shock experiments and provides the narrator with settlement papers so he won’t sue the plant.

Narrator ends up being helped by Mary, who lets him live with her for free in Harlem.  Narrator gives and impassioned speech about an elderly couple’s eviction.  Brother Jack overhears the speech and offers the narrator a Brotherhood Spokesman role.  The narrator takes the job to pay back Mary.  The Brotherhood gives him a new name and apartment.  He is inducted to the Brotherhood at the Corinthian Hotel.  He is trained by white Brother Hambro.  He then meets Todd Clifton,  a youth leader, and also becomes familiar with Ras the Extorter.  He receives an anonymous note that says “Remember your Race”.

Brother Wrestrum, a self-absorbed jerk, accuses the narrator of advancing a selfish desire for personal distinction.  The committee investigates the charges.  He is moved to a women’s rights post.  He is then seduced by a white woman who has sexual fantasies of black men.  The brotherhood then sends him back to Harlem.

Clifton disappears and other Brotherhood members have left the group.  Clifton is selling sambo dolls, stereotypically representing lazy slaves.  Clifton scuffles with the police who shoot him.  The narrator holds a funeral for Clifton, treating him like a hero.  Brother Jack is furious about the funeral, so much so that his glass eye falls out during an angry fit.

Ras confronts the narrator, so he disguises himself, being mistaken for Rinehart, a pimp, bookie, and reverend.  Hambro tells the narrator that people are tools and that the larger interests of the brotherhood are what matters.

The narrator wants to undermine the brotherhood.  He chooses Sybil, but she just wants to be seduced.  Chaos ensues from Ras the Extorter/Destroyer.  The narrator sets fire to the tenement building.  Ras calls for the narrator to be lynched.  Policemen suspect the narrator stole loot that is in his briefcase.  They chase him and he falls down a manhole, and the police put the cover over it so he can’t get out.  The end of his story is also the beginning of another story.  He must honor his individual complexity and remain true to his identity without sacrificing his responsibility to his community.  He is now ready to emerge from underground.

• Fainy McCreary (“Mac”) is a working man from an immigrant family that started out as a typesetter/printer, becomes a train-hopping newspaperman, and eventually marries a woman he met in California (Maisie Spencer). He is a wanderer that leaves behind his wife and two children after the weight of poverty, work, and family responsibilities take their toll.  He abandons his life to move to Mexico where he can be a champion for workers.
• Janey Williams is a young, poor, working class secretary from Washington, D.C. As a young girl, the boy she loved (Alec) and best friend of her brother Joe is killed in a motorcycle accident.  After dating a string of terrible men, she quits her job at a pro-German firm and moves to New York City. She  becomes J. Ward Moorehouse’s stenographer and eventually his secretary, taking trips with him all over the country and in Mexico.  Oddly, she is the only female acquaintance that doesn’t have a sexual relationship with him.
• Joe Williams, Janey’s brother, is a dropout that wanders from place to place, eventually joining the Navy but then going AWOL. He becomes a more prominent character in 1919 and The Big Money.  While he always wants a job on land, he keeps finding success on the seas, ending up in Europe.  On Armistice Day, in St. Nazaire, Joe attacks someone that is dancing with a girl he knows and believes to be his.  He dies after being hit over the head with a bottle.
• Eleanor Stoddard is a cold, young social climber from a well-off upper-middle class family from Georgetown. She and her friend Eveline Hutchins start a business as decorators.  After moving to New York to puruse a costuming and design job, she meets J. Ward Moorehouse and does decorating work for him.  She become a close platonic friend of which Moorehouse’s wife is envious.  She works for the Red Cross during the war and then, in the 1920s, uses connections in fashion to meet and become engaged to a Russian nobleman.
• Eveline Hutchins is the daughter of a minister, an artist and interior decorator, and a protégé of Eleanor Stoddard. She is not a happy person and has romantic views of the world, mostly impressed by wealth.  She has many relationships, never finding what she is looking for.  She and Eleanor are frienemies – friends and rivals with a relationship complicated by jealousy.  In the later novels, she becomes a more central and successful figure living a luxurious life.  In France, while she is Eleanor’s assistant in the Red Cross, she marries a shy young soldier named Paul Johnson.  Later she has an affair with Charley Anderson.  In the Big Money, Eveline, who becomes something of a socialite, kills herself with sleeping pills after one of her big parties.
• J. Ward Moorehouse (“Johnny” as a child and later “J.W.”) is the character that seems to tie all the other characters together in some way. He is from a middle-class family and well-educated.  He first marries Annabelle Strang, a wealthy pregnant American woman who cheats on him during their honeymoon in Paris.  Using some connections he made while in Paris, after returning to the United States, he ends up in Pittsburgh, where re marries Gertrude Staple and becomes a journalist.  He begins his new business with a firm doing high-level public relations using capital from his new wife’s wealthy family.  After the war, he becomes one of the leading advertising executives in the country, however he has no true depth or substance even with all his success and he is not happy.  He has a heart attack and survives, soon after making Dick Savage a partner in his firm.
• Charley Anderson is from Minnesota and ends up working as a mechanic in Minneapolis. He falls in love, but his best friend gets his girlfriend pregnant, causing him to travel the country looking for a purpose.  He becomes a flying ace during the war after he and his friend William H Rogers (“Doc”) enlist in the ambulance corps.  Having been a war hero, he becomes a wealthy airplane manufacturer and marries and divorces.  In Florida, after a plane crash, he meets Margo Dowling.  His drunkenness causes him to die a pathetic businessman after getting hit by a train that he was racing in a car.  His success, greed, and lust eventually lead to his downfall.
• Richard (“Dick”) Ellsworth Savage is a teenager that works at a summer hotel where he sleeps with a minster’s wife who is interested in his poetry. A government official pays for Dick to attend Harvard. After graduation, he avoids the draft by becoming a member of the ambulance service.  He later becomes one of J. Ward Moorehouse’s employees, looking to make the big money after being introduced by Eveline and Eleanor.  When he is sent to Rome on an errand, he meets Anne Elizabeth Trent, they have an affair, and she gets pregnant.  He isn’t in love with her and convinces her to have an abortion.
• Anne Elizabeth Trent (“Daughter”) is a volunteer nurse during the war. She becomes very anti-war after her brother is killed flying a training airplane in Texas as a member of the air force. She is convinced that the plane was not well made by a company that was cutting corners to make more money. When she meets Dick Savage she falls wildly in love, has sex with him and gets pregnant. He wants nothing to do with her or the baby and urges her to get rid of the baby.  She dies in a plane crash after convincing a drunk pilot to take her up in his plane.
• Ben Compton is a law student and labor activist that falls in love with Mary French but loses interest in her as he becomes more of an activist.  When Ben hears Mary talk about getting married and having kids, he tells her to wait until the U.S. government is overthrown in a violent uprising.
• Mary French is doctor’s daughter from Colorado that becomes a journalist and labor activist who eventually is an inconsequential worker for the labor revolution, even at the expense of her personal relationships. As a girl, her father treated the downtrodden in Trinidad, and her mother never felt he measured up.  Her mother inherited a lot of money after destroying her husband’s spirit.  Mary’s friend Ada is also influential in Mary’s life.
• Margo Dowling is an ambitious and uninhibited young Hollywood actress that starts out as a child actress who is sexually abused by her step-mother’s boyfriend.  As a young adult, Margo marries Tony, a Cuban guitar player with a drinking problem and ultimately becomes a mistress and a showgirl.  Tony reappears and steals Margo’s money.
  

• Conflict of rich and privileged versus poor and powerless.
• Ambition and selfishness lead to bad decisions, self-absorption, and a missed opportunities.
• Racism plays out with references to African Americans, Asians and Mexicans and immigrants in general.
• Ward Moorehouse’s story best represents the American Dream.
• Materialism – the characters most financially successful (Moorehouse, Dowling and Stoddard) are those that are the most greedy, superficial and materialistic while those that are altruistic (Compton and French) live in poverty.
• Exploitation of the working class (Mac and Joe and Janey Williams) – the system is set up to crush the workers.
• Decay of traditional values – despite their upbringing, none of the characters end up with healthy families or ore relationships.

• The 42nd Parallel – 1900 up to World War I
• 1919 – World War I and the Treaty of Versailles
• The Big Money – 1920s boom to 1930s bust

Along with stories of seemingly ordinary characters, many of which carry  through the three books, Dos Passos included Chicago Tribune newspaper headlines and songs (“Newreels”), personal thoughts (“Camera Eye”), and biographies of key historical figures (like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison).  While the stories of each character seem disconnected, they eventually merge together.  Through the stories of the characters, USA provides a broad view of life in the United States in the periods covered.

Struggle to be understood and not lost in a crowd

Shedding the shackles of loneliness

“Hands” is the story of Wing Biddlebaum, a recluse and former school teacher with remarkable hands, who was falsely accused of molesting a boy at the school where Biddlebaum used to teach, causing him to move.

“Paper Pills” describes Doctor Reefy, who marries a young patient that dies six months later.

“Mother” is about Elizabeth Willard, George Willard’s (the narrator) mother.  Elizabeth is ill and unhappily married to George’ father and the two struggle to influence their son.  Elisabeth and Tom Willard own a boarding house in Winesburg, which is perpetually on the verge of failure, like their marriage.

In “The Philosopher”, Doctor Parcival imagines that a lynch mob is after him, and tells George Willard that “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified”.   Doctor Parcival has a small medical practice, but never seems to run out of money. There is question about whether he has a criminal past.  The doctor oddly asks George to promise him that if anything happens after he doesn’t treat a local girl that George will write a book containing the secret of human life–“that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.”

In “Nobody Knows,” George sleeps with a girl named Louise Trunnion whom he doesn’t love, leaving him feeling guilty afterward. After feeling an odd mix of pride and embarrassment George says to himself, “she hasn’t got anything on me.  Nobody knows.”

“Godliness” is four stories about Jesse Bentley, a wealthy farmer that inherits the family farm after his brothers die in the Civil War and believes that he is a biblical figure chosen by God. He shows no love to his daughter, Louise Bentley (a smart girl tormented by the family with which she lives), who later marries unhappily.  Louise’s son David Hardy later lives with his grandfather Jesse.  When Jesse and David search for a message from God, Jesse is so scared by his grandfather (who sacrifices a lamb in front of his grandson) that Jesse leaves Winesburg for good.

“A Man of Ideas” is about Joe Welling dating a woman whose father and brother are notorious thugs.  Joe organizes a local baseball team, making him a well-respected manager. He starts dating Sarah King, a “lean, sad-looking woman” whose father and brother are widely considered dangerous. Instead of risking his life, he ends up impressing the family with a “tidal wave of words.”

“Adventure” is about Alice Hindman, an unmarried 27 year-old woman whose true love (as she considers him), Ned Curie, left Winesburg for Chicago years ago and has never returned even though he told her he would come back for her. Even though she is getting older, she cannot imagine herself marrying anyone but “Neddie.” One night, she decides on a whim to run outside in the rain.  Aashamed, she rushes back inside and lies down to face the wall and accept “bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone.”

“Respectability” is about an obese and antisocial telegraph operator in Winesburg, Wash Williams, who despises all women because his wife was unfaithful to him and his mother-in-law is horrible.  Wash is bitter because he loved his wife very much, only to discover that she was cheating on him with a number of men. He left her immediately and tried to reconcile with her, realizing later that women are depraved and deceitful.

“The Thinker” is about Seth Richmond, who dates a banker’s daughter but later decides to leave town for good.  He leaves town thinking about how Helen will probably end up in love with “some fool… some one like that George Willard.”

“Tandy” tells the story of a little girl named Tandy Hard whose first name comes from a drunken man’s description of the perfect woman.   Oddly, after hearing the story, she demands that her father always call her “Tandy Hard.”

In “The Strength of God”, Reverand Curtis Hartman is a Peeping Tom Presbyterian minister who lusts after Kate Swift, a local schoolteacher that he can see from a church bell tower window into her apartment. Having little experience with women he is fascinated by Kate, giving passionate minstiry as he fights his sexual temptations.  He is no longer tempted when he sees her praying naked one evening.

“The Teacher” takes place on the same night, but this time Kate Smith (the same teacher in the prior chapter) is attracted to George Willard.  George is confused by Kate and unsure of her affection.  George also encounters the Reverend Hartman who is oddly speaking about Kate’s holiness.

In “Loneliness”, Enoch Robinson moves from Winesburg to New York, where he lives among imaginary friends that move out of his apartment after he tells his female neighbor about them.

In “An Awakening”, George Willard tries to talk to Belle Carpenter (whom he is dating) about a realization he has had.  However, Ed Handby, someone else interested in Belle beats up George.  Afterward, George notices that all the magic has vanished from an evening–and a town–that now seem “squalid and commonplace.”

In “Queer”, Elmer Cowley is an unsuccessful curiosity store owner’s son that feels judged as “odd” by Winesburg, and this sentiment manifests itself particularly through George Willard.  Elmer beats up George and jumps onto a passing train out of Winesburg.

In “The Untold Lie”, Hal Winters asks another farmhand named Ray Pearson (married with six children) for advice about whether to get married after getting a girl pregnant, causing Ray to reflect on his own marriage that disgusts him.  It turns out that Ray also got married when he got a girl pregnant.  Ray tells Hal not to get married and to stay free at whatever cost. Hal decides to marry the girl. As Ray walks home, a pleasant memory of his children seems to come to him, and he realizes that whatever he would have told Hal, “it would have been a lie.”

“Drink” is about Tom Foster’s first drunken experience.  George Willard happens to walk by Tom and Tom says that he has made love to Helen While.  George, who has feelings of his own for the girl, tries to quiet Tom, but Tom takes his hand and tells him that he is glad to be drunk because it has taught him something and allowed him to suffer like everyone else.

In “Death,” Elizabeth Willard and Doctor Reefy spend time together and begin to fall in love, as she slips toward death. She dies, finally, having never told of $800  that her father left her and she hid under a floorboard.  She dies before Doctor Reefy gets to see her before death and George decides to quit Winesburg forever.

In “Sophistication,” George and Helen White go out walking together on the night of the county fair, and run around like children as they are about to leave town. “For some reason they could not have explained, they had both got from their silent evening together the thing needed.”

The final story “Departure” is about leaving Winesburg for good, letting his life there “become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”  As the train pulls away from the station, he leans back in his seat and remembers little details of life in Winesburg. When he looks up, the town has disappeared, and has “become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”

• Lewis Lambert Strether – The 55 year old protagonist of the novel on a mission to return his fiancee’s son to run the family business.  As an editor of an intellectual magazine in Woollett, Massachusetts, Strether has learned as much about himself on his mission as he has about Chad.  Strether quickly realizes that his life in Woollett is a boring routine. At the end of the novel, Strether returns to Woollett, but his outlook on life is forever changed.
  

• Chadwick Newsome – A handsome bachelor currently involved in a love affair with the older Madame Marie de Vionnet. Paris affects Chad only superficially, and he looks forward to returning home to Woollett after his enjoyable, but not profound, experience in Europe.

Americans abroad – some love the experience while others think they have all they need at home

Contrast of city (Paris – debauchery) versus Woollett, MA (puritan)

Strether and Mrs. Newsom are connected in several ways.  She pays for a review of the arts for which Strether is the editor and is also his fiancée.  Strether is trying to retrieve Chad Newsome in part to demonstrate his loyalty to Mrs. Newsome.  The family wants Chad to return to run the family business and to marry Mamie Pocock, a bright pretty girl and also the sister of Jim Pocock.  While Strether says he has nothing to gain by returning Chad to Woollett, he has much to lose if he misses his errand.

Chad has been resident in Paris and seldom communicates with home.  Chad has darkened his widowed mother’s life.  Chad has had free use of the family money that comes from a family business – the article produced is of common domestic use, but it is never revealed.  Jim Pocock sits on the Board of that business.

As Strether gets more accustomed to Europe, he walks the Tuileries Garden and takes in the city, nostalgic for his youth and possibility, feeling young and free.  Visiting Boulevard Malsherbes, Chad’s apartment, Strether meets Charles Little Bilham, a short man who often goes by “Little Billham”.  Chad had traveled to Cannes a month ago but is expected back in a week.  Little Billham is an aspiring artist from the US.

Waymarsh and Strether meet afterward, and Waymarsh insists that Chad ought to go home.  Waymarsh is grouchy and not a fan of Europe.  The next day, Strether and Waymarsh meet Little Billham for breakfast, being introduced to Mrs. Barace, a friend of Little Billham who annoys Waymarsh.  The description of Chad the man at breakfast is different from the Chad that left for Europe years ago.

With Miss Gostrey, Strether visits the Louvre.  He discusses how Little Billham promised to write favorably of Strether, which will entice Chad to come back to Paris.  Miss Gostrey asks many questions, as she does throughout the book.  Later, Strether and Gostrey visit Little Billham’s studio, as Chad is funding Little Billham’s art show.

Gostrey invites Strether to the opera, and Waymarsh joins.  Miss Gostrey discusses how Chad has been playing the situation to his advantage.  During the performance, Chad arrives but nobody can speak for a half hour because the arrival was in the middle of the performance.  They left the play together and noticed Chad’s “awfully old gray hair”, and proposed that Chad should come home, a final break with Paris.  Chad challenges Strether by remarking that he would be bringing Chad home as a wedding president.

Chad tells Strether that he likes Paris itself and it isn’t necessarily a woman that is keeping him there, to which Strether says that there should be no reason not to return.  There are many reasons to pretend there isn’t a woman.  Chad has heard a lot about Mamie.  Gloriani the sculptor will have a party that Chad invites Strether to attend.  Strether is shocked that Chad keeps such important company.

Strether takes Billham aside and they discuss how Chad has changed.  He acknowledges a refined virtuous attachment, but doesn’t spell out what the relationship consists of.  A mother and daughter are that virtuous attachment.  Chad describes them as his best friends in the world.

They all meet at Gloriani’s party, where is Strether is introduced as one of Chad’s mother’s great friends.  Chad introduces Marie de Vionnet to Strether, and the two talk together.  She asks if Miss Gostrey has mentioned her.  They have known each other for many years.

Strether incorrectly believes Jeanne, the Countess’ daughter, is the object of Chad’s desire.  Miss Gostrey and Mme de Vionnet knew each other from school in Geneva.  Miss Gostrey mentioned that the Count De Vionnet is a brute, but that the two have not divorced and can’t.

Chad and Strether walk the Rue de Rivoli and discuss the fact that Paris has been good for Strether.  Mme de Vionnet asks Strether to delay Chad’s return.  They allude to Miss. Gostrey’s disappearance from Paris.  It is in Strether’s hands to save Chad from returning.  Strether committed to try.  He spoke with Billham, and Strether recognized his attachment to the de Vionnets.

Strether reflected introspectively by visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral.  There he saw a lady in a chapel that was fixed in place until she recognized him; it was Mme. de Vionnet.  They went to a café together afterward.  Strether explained to Mme. De Vionnet how he communicated favorably about her to Mrs. Newsome.  She pleaded with Strether to stay in Paris, to which Strether replies that his work is done.  Strether thinks it is important that Mrs. Newsome see the great changes in Chad.

Part II of the book focuses on Strether’s realization that it is important to live while you can.

Strether gets a telegram to return to Woollett by the first ship, and shares the telegram with Chad in which the family communicated that they are on their way. Waymarsh had written as an agent against Strether.  While Chad is ready to go back, Strether isn’t ready and he asks Chad to stay abroad for a while.  And Miss Gostrey speculates that Mamie is the tool that Woollett chooses to make that happen.

Chad then received a telegram saying that the Pococks were on their way. And while

Strether sent a lot of letters, he received none.

Awaiting the arrival of the Pococks, Strether had breakfast with Waymarsh, who appeared at breakfast one day -sheepish and uneasy.  Waymarsh says that native reinforcements will ease his time abroad.  The relationship between Waymarsh and Strether was challenged.

Strether tried to visit Mme de Vionnet, but she is away in the country for three days.  He wanted to speak with her.  Sara is not going to be open to meeting or therefore liking Mme de Vionnet.  Strether and Jim rode together.  Jim says that he is on the trip to enjoy himself.  Jim says he wouldn’t give up Europe to return to the business.  Jim implies that things look bad from Woollett and that Strether is having too much fun in Europe.  Jim therefore sees an opportunity to see the varieties or the follies.

Strether visited Sara at the hotel.  Mme. De Vionnet was visiting Sara without Chad, offering advice that Sara was not open to receiving.  Strether finds he has to defend his relationship with Miss Gostrey.  Sara has plans for other countries and is only in Paris a short time. Mrs. Newsome was not strong enough for a sea crossing.

Unknown to Strether, Waymarsh and Sara had become good friends – “native reinforcements”.  Meanwhile, Strether and Mme. De Vionnet discuss Jeanne getting married, with Chad planning a lot of the event.  Strether realized that Chad had different intentions about returning home.

Strether tried to visit Sara again.  He ended up seeing Mamie instead of Sara.  Mamie said that she found Billham enchanting and that she adores the others, including Chad who she likes as a brother.  Sara mentions that any man is nice when he is in love.  And when Strether asks her if he is nice, she answers that the question is whether Strether is still in love.

Strether and Billham discuss how Mamie is interested in Billham.  Strether gives fatherly advice to Billham, lecturing him about living all he can.  It is a mistake not to.  Strether sees himself as old now so he encourages Billham to live.

Waymarsh delivers news to Strether that Sara would like him to meet her before she leaves for Switzerland.  Waymarsh tells him not to do anything he’d be sorry for.  Sara arrives, dressed for battle and then treats Strether rudely.  Chad informed Sara that he would leave in a moment if Strether gives the word.  Sara said to consider this the “word”.  Sara accuses Strether of exposing the family to humiliation.  She says that her instructions from Mrs. Newsome are her affair and that his conduct is an outrage.  She implies to Strether that Madame de Vionnet is not as good a woman as Sara and Mrs. Newsome.  Sara says that the most distinguished woman in the world sits insulted in her loneliness by incredible comparison to Mme. De Vionnet.

Chad told Strether how he told Sara to see Strether.  Strether describes how Sara was after him and not Chad.  Chad encourages Strether not to give up money (a good deal of it).  Sara hates Chad in Paris.  Strether remained independent for days introspective, relying on nobody to discuss his thoughts.  He appreciated the countryside and walked along the town.  He decided he would stay at a little place where he could rent a room.  Another couple was also staying in the same place and places were set for them to have dinner, but they were out on a boat.  As the boat advanced around a bend, the figures became more recognizable.  The figures seemed to recognize him.  It was Mme. De Vionnet and Chad.  It was a coincidence and Strether had wondered whether he was imagining that the couple was them.

While Strether had arranged a carriage after dinner to catch a train to Paris, it becomes obvious that the couple did not intend to leave that evening.  Strether feels bad for interrupting their last time together.  Mme. De Vionnet has a discussion with Strether once back in Paris.  She wants Strether to stay so they can all get together.  Where is his home now?  His life has been changed.  She recognizes that she is the loser in the end.

Strether visits Chad at midnight.  He tells Chad that he can’t forsake Mme. De Vionnet.  Chad has been away in London.  Strether doesn’t want Chad to be flippant about her.  Chad is discussing advertising.  There is a lot of money in advertising.

Strether and Miss Gostrey have a last encounter.  He asks for guidance.  He realizes that he should have seen something was going on.  He is returning home, and Miss Gostrey asks what he is going home to?  There is nothing she wouldn’t do for him.  He must go to be right.  He has been an ambassador for others and not for himself.  Strether chooses to return to the United States.

• Rosemary Hoyt is an 18-year-old movie starlet vacationing in the French Riviera and falls in love with Dick Diver.
• Dick Diver is a handsome American psychologist in his 30s.  He was a son of a clergyman on his way to success but falls to his ruin after marrying Nicole.
• Nicole Diver is Dick’s wife who seems extraordinary with grace and sophistication.  She comes from a wealthy family and has a tragic past.
• Tommy Barban is a half-American half-French mercenary soldier in love with Nicole.  He ultimately takes her from Dick.
• Abe North is Dick’s best friend, a brilliant musician that drinks away his career and is killed in a speakeasy.
• Mary North is Abe’s’ wife that marries a wealthy Compte di Minghetti after Abe dies.  There is a weird bath incident with dirty water that is an affront to Nicole.
• Baby Warren is Nicole’s Anglophile sister.
• Franz Gregorovius is Dr. Gregory, Dick’s clinic partner.
• Devereu Warren is the wealthy father of Nicole and Baby, a sexual abuser who put his daughter in a metal clinic.
• Albert McKisco is an obnoxious American intellectual with an inferiority complex who establishes himself as a prize author.  He had a duel with Tommy Barban
• Violet McKisco is Albert’s obnoxious wife.
• Collis Clay is Rosemary’s friend that gossips about Rosemary and rescues Dick from prison
• Jules Peterson is a black man killed in Rosemary’s room in Paris on account of Abe North’s drunkenness.
• Lanier and Topsy are Dick and Nicole’s children
• Dr. Dohmler is a psychologist that tries to steer Dick away from Nicole.

The cultural world of mannered aristocracy

Definitions of fame and success

Tragedy of mental illness

Social class

Sexual abuse

Codependent love

Dick attended Yale, was a Rhodes Scholar and moved to Vienna to study clinical psychology.  Dick met Nicole; a 10-year-old who was being checked into the clinic he was leaving.

Nicole was a Chicago heiress who had been sexually abused by her father (Devereux) and developed a fear of men.  Dick and Nicole fell in love, with Dick eventually serving as both Doctor and husband.  They travel extensively and have two children.

Nicole relapses, so they buy a clinic in Switzerland.  Dick is accused of infidelity by a former patient, so Nicole runs their car off the road with jealousy (the story is not true).  Dick’s father dies in America, so he goes to the funeral.  Dick meets Rosemary at a hotel and they consummate the romance that they started a few years before.  Dick starts carousing, gets drunk, gets beat up and imprisoned and must be rescued by Baby Warren, Nicole’s sister.

As he drinks more, Dick is eventually asked to leave the clinic.  The Divers return to the Riviera, where Dick continues to drink and unravel, insulting their old friends.

Nicole has an affair with Tommy Barban and asks Dick for a divorce so she can marry Tommy.  Dick readily agrees.  Nicole overcame her psychological condition.  Dick disappears to America and settles into smaller and smaller towns, never settling down.

• Old Major – prize boar that drams of a farm without humans to oppress and control the animals
• Boxer – an old cart horse that continually works harder, bringing out his own death
• Snowball – a boar that teaches animals to read
• Napoleon – a boar that teaches puppies to become attack dogs

• Carrie Meeber rises from an 18-year old low paid wage earner to a high paid actress. She is from Wisconsin but ends up in Chicago, New York, London, and back to New York.
• George Hurstwood is an upper middle class manager who falls from a comfortable lifestyle to a man of the streets.
• Charlie Drouet is a traveling salesman that introduces himself to Carrie on a train traveling from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Chicago.

Both main characters earn their fate through random circumstances

·      Identities are constantly changing

·      Modern American Experience

·      Developing a career in a capitalist economy

·      Conspicuous consumption – accumulation of material things is the surest route to high status.

·      A crime is in getting caught – not the act itself!

Drouet goes to Fitzgerald and Moys, an upscale salon where George Hurstwood is the manager.  Soon after, Carrie encounters Drouet on the street and he takes her to lunch and gives her $20 and buys her new clothes  Drouet offers to rent a room for her.  She leaves her sister a note and departs and they never meet again.  Drouet invites Hurstwood to play cards and to introduce Carrie.  Drouet tries to appear wealthier than he really is.

We learn more about Hurstwood’s wife Julia, who hopes that their daughter Jessica will marry rich.  Around this time in the novel, Drouet doesn’t marry Carrie because he is still wrapping up a real estate deal (and always has an excuse).  Hurstwood meanwhile starts to fall for Carrie.  Drouet is boring by comparison.  Hurstwood is too busy at work to join outings with his wife, but thinks of an affair as a threat to his job and livelihood  (rather than a threat to his marriage!).  While Carrie is unhappy that she doesn’t have nice clothes, Julia wants a whole greater level of luxuries – European trips.

The more each character pretends to play his role, the harder it s to know what is really genuine.

Hurstwood confesses his love for Carrie.  Drouet figures out about the affair over time.  There is some foreshadowing when, at a theater, a beggar asks for money.  Drouet gies money, Hurstwood doesn’t notice, and Carrie forgets.  Hurstwood’s family takes constant advantage of the lifestyle that Hurstwood offers them.  Drouet’s Elk Lodge has a furniture fundraiser play.  Carrie Madena is born.  This will protect her reputation if she is a failure.  The book implies that a woman only has social standing when a man desires her.  After a flop of a start to the play in which Carrie is performing, she becomes more comfortable and has a big finish.  Hurstwood and Drouet suddenly both become more serious in their attraction to her.

A chambermaid reveals the affair to Drouet.  Julia learns of the affair also, and a divorce ensues.  Julia had all of the couple’s property in her name and she threatens to reveal his affair at work, which would destroy his career.

After Carrie cuts off her ties with Droiet and Hurstwood, Hurstwood can’t be without her.  He steals $10,000 from a safe at work.  He flees and tells Carrie that Drouet is in the hospital.  They go to Montreal together, where a detective spots him.  Hurstwood then sends $9,500 back to avoid arrest.

Hurstwood purchases a one-third share in a small New York saloon, but it is not a good business and it fails.  He must learn to live on a small amount of money.  Mrs. Vance, a neighbor in New York, like Carrie and introduces her to her cousin Mr. Ames, who is charming and wealthy.  Hurstwood deteriorates and had not job.  He reads newspapers all day.  Carrie becomes a chorus girl for $12 a week and keeps getting better and being paid a  larger salary.  Carrie meets Lola, another performer, and shares an apartment with her.  She borrows $25 and give Hurstwood $20 before leaving him, effectively paying him pack the initial $20 he gave her.

Hurstwood gets ill and becomes a beggar.  Jessica marries a wealthy man.  Hurstwood commits suicide by leaving the gas on in a motel.  Carrie’s success gros but she suffers from unsatisfied desires.  She never learns of Hurstwood’s death.  Mrs. Vance seeks Carrie’s acquaintances after ignoring her.

• Ed Gentry is a graphic artist and the narrator of the book.
• Bobby Trippe is an insurance salesman.
• Drew Ballinger is a soft drink executive.
• Lewis Medlock is a landlord and the driving force behind the trip.

Effects of civilization on society – city versus country and survival instincts

Rites of passage –

At a gas station, Drew plays a guitar duet with Lonnie, a local boy that plays banjo.  Lonnie is an intellectually disabled, albino, inbred musical savant.

The men arrange with the Griner brothers, mechanics, to drive their cars to Aintry, where the men can retrieve their cars after their canoe voyage.

Ed awakens and goes hunting with his bow and arrow.  He shoots and misses a deer at the last minute because he loses his nerve.

Ed and Bobby set off in one canoe ahead of Lewis and Drew.  Two mountain men attack Bobby and Ed in the woods.  They tie Ed to a tree and cut him.  They then strip Bobby from the waist down and the older man violently rapes him, causing Bobby to scream.  Lewis and Drew hear the scream.  The other mountain man prepares to have Ed perform fellatio on him.  Lewis shoots the old guy with an arrow before it can happen.  Ed snatches the gun and the hillbilly dies.

Lewis wants to bury the body.  Bobby is worried that others will learn what happened and agrees to bury the body.  Drew wants to tell the authorities, but they decide to bury the body instead.

Drew falls out of a canoe in the falls and drowns.  Lewis breaks his leg and the canoe breaks apart.

Lewis declares that that Drew was shot by the escaped hillbilly.  Ed decides to climb the gorge to kill the remaining hillbilly.  Ed shoots him from a tree.  Ed gorges himself with an arrow when he falls from the tree escaping a gunshot.  Ed lowers the body from a cliff.  The dead body falls on its face.  The men weight and sink the corpse.  Ed throws any remaining evidence in the river.  They later find Drew’s body and sink it because the shot shows on his body and would ruin their alibi.

The men arrive at Aintry and say that they suffered a canoeing accident and Drew must have drowned.  Fragments of the wooden canoe were then found to be recovered a day earlier than the accident occurred, so they modify their story.

The Deputy Sheriff is highly suspicious of the men’s story because his brother-in-law is one of the missing hillbillies.  He assumes that men must have something to do with the disappearance.

After no sign of foul play after dragging the river, the Sheriff lets the men go.

Ed returns to city life.  The river is ultimately dammed.  And Bobby moves to Hawaii because he would always look like dead weight and remember the screaming.

• Henry Miller is an impoverished writer that demands personal freedom and frequents prostitutes.
• Collins is a drunken sailor that takes care of ill Henry.
• Tania is a lover of Henry.  She is a beautiful Russian woman married to Sylvester.
• Carl is a friend of Henry that is a complaining writer who is very negative and frequents prostitutes
• Boris is a friend who is an intellectual writer that hates his wife and resents other writers.  He fades out of Henry’s life.
• Fillmore is an American diplomat and heavy drinker that is rescued by Henry from fiancée
• Mona is Henry’s wife, an elegant but poor woman that sends money to Henry from America
• Van Norden is Henry’s friend that is a self-loathing writer and sex addict, misogynist and pessimist.

Poverty and disease – starving artist and filth and despair

Writing and art – uninhibited self-expression

Death and dying – civilization has gone mad – reborn through art

Set in France in the 1920s and 1930s, the story centers on Miller’s life as a struggling writer.  The book combined autobiography with fiction.  IT is immersive meditation on the human conditions.

Miller describes his experience of living among a community of Bohemians in Paris, where Miller suffers from hunger and homelessness, squalor, loneliness and despair over recent separation from his wife.

There are many sexual encounters.

Boris is a friend that rents rooms at the Villa Borghese.

Carl is a writer friend that complains about positive people, about Paris and about writing (he has a rich girlfriend)

Collins is a Sailor that befriends Fillmore and Miller

Fillmore is a young man in diplomatic service and invites Miller to stay with him

Mona is the estranged wife (2nd) in America

Tania is married to Sylvester

VanNorden is sexually corrupt – total lack of empathy for women – uses the C*** word a lot.

• Newland Archer – wealthy young lawyer engaged to marry May Welland. While in love with May, he is intrigued by May’s cousin Countess Ellen Olenska and appreciates her independent nature and lack of the adherence to upper crust New York mindset.  Archer must choose between his duty to May and his desire for Ellen.
• Countess Ellen Olenska – May’s cousin and Mrs. Manson Mingott’s granddaughter. Raised in Europe and married to a philandering Polish count, she returns to New York to rejoin her family who judges her and tries to control her life.
• May Welland – fiancée and eventual wife of Newland Archer who can’t think for herself and does everything according to New York society’s expectations. She pretends to not know that Archer is in love with Olenska, but she is well aware and forces him to give her up without ever saying anything about it.
• Henry and Louisa van der Luyden – aristocracy from a Netherlands family and the highest in New York society pecking order. They are rarely in public and only occasionally have visitors in their Madison Avenue mansion.
• Julius Beaufort – a British banker that hosts a lot of parties using money that he acquired from questionable transactions. He has a terrible business failure that causes him to be exiled from New York society.
• Laurence Lefferts – the expert in all things good taste, he is a gossip that cheats on his wife and gets away with it.
• Medora Manson – Ellen’s aunt that raised her after her parents’ death. She would be an outcast were it not for family connections.
• Archer and Janey Archer – Archer’s mother and sister who gossip and challenge Archer’s views.
• Lemuel Struthers – popular lady that has artistic gatherings and is not part of the society crowd.
• Manson Mingott – May and Ellen’s grandmother – described every way possible to say that she is overweight. She has a lot of influence over the New York crowd.  She supports Ellen when she leaves New York to return to Europe.
• Ned Winsett – journalist friend of Archer who isn’t trapped in the society crowd and has a lot of freedoms that Archer does not have.
• Sillerton Jackson – an elderly friend of the Archers.  He knows everything about historic gossip and history.

• Female emancipation – “Women should be free…as free as we are”
• Conformity and hypocritical customs of blue blood society
• New York Aristocracy and the Golden Age of New York
• “Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”
• In the Age of Innocence, people lived within strict social rules where imaginative and passionate living is neither heard of nor sanctioned.

Engaged to May Welland, Newland Archer takes a fancy to May’s cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska.  After Olenska’s Polish count husband cheats on her, Ellen decides to return to her family in New York; shocking them all with her free spirit, revealing clothing, and rumors of affairs.  Archer and May befriend her when the grandmother, Mrs. Manson Mingott reintroduces her to good society.

Archer is attracted to Ellen’s unconventional views of New York society and sees her in start contrast to his boring fiancée May.  May is all things expected of her social circle and lacking of any sort of individuality or opinions of her own.

When Ellen wants to divorce her husband, and Archer is the lawyer the family asks to assist with preventing the divorce, the family pressures her to stay married.  Archer falls in love with Ellen, yet pressures Mau’s parents to shorten their engagement.  May asks him whether he wants to marry faster because he is in love with someone else.  After admitting to Ellen that he is in love with her, Archer receives a telegram indicating that the Welland’s support a short engagement and a fast marriage.

After returning from the honeymoon, Ellen and Newland meet up in Newport, and Ellen promises not to return to Europe so long as she and Newland don’t act on their mutual love. Ellen returns to New York to care for her grandmother after a stroke.  Just after Ellen and Newland agree to consummate their affair, Ellen suddenly announces her plans to return to Europe and May throws an extravagant going away party for her and the romance is never consummated.  After the guests leave the party, May announces to Archer that she is pregnant and that she told Ellen the news two weeks earlier (before she actually knew she was pregnant).

After 25 years, May has died from pneumonia after nursing the youngest child, and the oldest son (of three children) convinces Archer to travel to France with him.  He tells his father that the day before his mother died, she told him that Archer had given up the thing he most wanted when she asked him to.  They arrange a visit to Countess Olenska at her apartment in Paris.  At the last minute, Archer sends his son upstairs alone and walks away from the apartment back to his hotel choosing to be content with living with his memories of the past rather than meeting Ellen again.  She is more real to him in his imagination than if he went upstairs.

• Marlow is an introspective sailor who takes a journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, an idealistic man of great abilities.  As a kid Marlow was fascinated by the blank spaces on the map of Africa.

Madness as a result of imperialism

Absurdity of evil – hypocrisy, ambiguity, and moral confusion

futility – European presence in Africa

Contradiction and ambivalence

Hollowness – hollow emptiness = imperialism robbed Europeans of their moral substance.

Kurtz painted a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch.

Steamship has been sunk and will take months for parts to repair it.  Manager and brickmaker fear that Kurtz is a threat to their position.  Kurtz is rumored to be ill.

Marlow sets out with a few agents and the manager and some cannibals.  They are pilgrims that carry long wooden staves.

Marlow and crew come across a hut with stacked firewood with a note saying to approach cautiously.

The ship is attacked by a band of natives firing arrows from the forest, killing the African helmsman.  Marlow frightens the natives with the ship’s steam whistle.  They arrive at Kurtz’s inner station.

A Russian trader had left firewood – claims Kirtz has enlarged his mind and cannot be subjected to the same moral judgements as normal people.

Kurtz has established himself as a God with natives and has gone on brutal raids in surrounding territory in search for ivory.

Severed heads adorn fence posts.

Manager brings Kurtz aboard steamer while Kurtz’s mistress, a native woman, appears on shore and stares out at the ship.  The Russian reveals that Kurtz ordered an attack on the steamer to make them believe he was dead.  The Russian leaves by canoe.  Kurtz disappears in the night and Marlowe goes out in search of him, finding him crawling on all fours toward the native camp.

Marlow convinces Kurtz to return to ship and they set off down river next morning but Kurtz’s health is failing fast.

Marlow listens to Kurtz talk while he pilots the ship and Kurtz entrusts Marlow with personal documents including eloquent pamphlet on civilizing savages which ends with “exterminate all the brutes”.

Steamer breaks down and they stop for repairs.

Kurtz dies, uttering “the horror, the horror”.

Marlow falls ill but survives.

Marlow visits Kurtz’s fiancée (intended).  She is still in mourning and praises Kurtz as a paragon of virtue and achievement. The intended asks what were Kurtz’s last words.  Marlow says that Kurtz’s last words were here name.

• Lucy Honeychurch – young middle class girl from Surrey that visits a pension in Florence, Italy with her cousin Charlotte.  Her piano skills show that she has potential for great passions, but she will have to ignore expected social codes. She ultimately chooses to follow the true instincts of love (George) over social expectations (Cecil).
• Charlotte Bartlett – Lucy’s older spinster cousin and chaperone with old-fashioned values who disproves of the Emersons. After standing in the way of Lucy’s happiness she ultimately helps Lucy find marital happiness.
• George Emmerson – A young man with an appreciation for truth, he falls in love with Lucy in Italy, encouraging her not to marry Cecil and helping her follow her heart.
• Mr. Emmerson – While a genuine person, he has an abrupt manner and regularly offends proper societal conventions. He is integral to Lucy’s decision to know her true desires.
• Cecil Vyse – a pretentious, unkind and disrespectful wealthy man engaged to Lucy.  He expects her to be submissive, but he is awkward and loses her respect.

Social boundaries are arbitrary.

Beauty exists even where people find it inappropriate.

Follow the heart.

Eldon, the aging butler, calls out “Ellen” as he is dying.

Agatha Burch sits with Eldon as he lies dying.

Edith – young object of Raunce’s affection and servant for the Tennants.

Mrs. Swift – the heavy-drinking nanny.

Charley Raunce is the head footman that instructs Burt on how to siphon whiskey from Eldon’s decanter.  After Eldon dies, Raunce becomes butler, so he retrieves Eldon’s account book and diary to understand the preferences of visitors, leading to better tips.

• Jeeter Lester is a sharecropper who no longer works the land because the man who owns the land has moved away and cut him off. Jeeter has a family but does very little to provide for them. Jeeter often blames others for his situation—blaming the land’s owner for his inability to get cotton seed, blaming his son-in-law for not giving him food, and blaming his mother for eating too much. Jeeter believes that he cannot get a job in the city because the land is in his blood. Jeeter wants to continue working the land and continuously says he is about to prepare the fields, but often the spring passes too fast and Jeeter cannot plant the crop soon enough.
• Lov Bensey – Lester’s neighbor and son-n law who marries 12 year old Pearl
• Pearl Lester – a 12 year old that is forced to marry Lov Bensey, however, decides to run away rather than be forced to stay with Lov and to sleep with him.
• Ada Lester – Jeeter’s wife
• Old Lady Lester is the grandmother who gets driven over by her grandson
• Sister Bessie – a middle age woman that marries Dude Lester, a 16 year old. She is missing a bone in her nose that makes it seem like others are looking down a double barrel shotgun.  She buys a new car that gets ruined in a matter of days using the money her ex husband left her when he died.
• Tom Lester – wants nothing to do with Jeeter and Ada Lester and says they can go to hell. He also calls Sister Bessie a two-bit slut.

• Inability to Adjust – the Lesters live on a piece of land that belongs to another man. They are sharecroppers, working the land in exchange for a place to live. However, the man who owns the Lesters’ home has given up on farming and moved to the city.
• Poverty and challenging changing economic circumstances
• Lack of responsibility – everyone blames others for their situations that are completely in their control.

Lov Bensey is Jeeter’s neighbor who has married Pearl, a 12 year old Lester child and he is upset that Pearl won’t sleep with him.  After purchasing a sack of turnips and carrying them for miles, Lov visits Jeeter to discuss the situation with him.  Jeeter only has eyes for the turnips because the family is starving.   Lov wants Jeeter to talk to Pearl so she will sleep with him.  Lov takes some notice of Ellie May, Jeeter’s other daughter, flirting with her despite her appearance caused by a hairlip. Soon Lov becomes so entranced with Ellie May that he forgets to protect his turnips. Jeeter steals the turnips and runs away.

Jeeter eats most of the turnips and then begins to feel badly. Jeeter shares some of the turnips with his son, Dude. When they return to the house, they find  Sister Bessie, a local woman who is the pastor of her own church following in the footsteps of her deceased pastor husband.  Sister Bessie prays with Jeeter’s son Dude, wrapping her arms around him to pray. Sister Bessie is so excited by Dude’s touch that she almost forgets about what she is praying. Sister Bessie returns to the Lester home tomorrow to announce that God wants her to marry Dude. Using $800 that her husband left to her, Sister Bessie buy a new car that she and Dude can drive around the country to preach. They also marry.

Dude and Sister Bessie spend the day driving around in the new car. When they return to the Lester farm, the car is damaged. Dude tells them that a wagon was going too slowly on the road in front of them and they slammed into it, killing the black man driving the wagon; however, the accident was the black man’s fault anyway. That night, Dude and Sister Bessie stay with the Lester in their small, two room house.

The next day, Jeeter talks Sister Bessie and Dude into taking him to Augusta to sell some firewood. They damaged the new car’s engine by forgetting to put oil in the tank.  In Augusta, nobody is interested in buying the firewood.  They sell the car’s spare tire to afford a hotel, which seems to be a place where prostitutes work.  Sister Bessie is pulled from the room and offered other places to sleep, finding herself sharing beds with several other men.

The following morning, they still can’t sell the wood. Jeeter becomes angry and decides to burn the wood by the side of the road, but he cannot get it to burn. Once back at the farm, Jeeter argues with Sister Bessie over her decision not to take him to visit his son, Tom. When Jeeter learns that Tom refused to help his parents financially, Jeeter again argues with Sister Bessie and Dude. The argument escalates into a physical fight. Sister Bessie and Dude drive off, but as they do, they run over the old grandmother.

That night, after burying the old grandmother, Jeeter decides to burn the fields to prepare them for planting even though he does not have any money to buy seed. The fire burns away from the house, so Jeeter decides to go to bed. However, during the night the fire turns back toward the house and burns it down around Jeeter and his wife, Ada. Lov and Dude bury Jeeter and Ada the following day and don’t have a need to worry about the style of dress that Ada will be buried in (a fixation she had). Dude thinks maybe he might find a way to plant the fields.

Marion – Sebastian’s wife who leaves him after receiving money from Sebastian’s father after a plea for help.

Chris – Sebastian’s play toy laundress with whom he has an affair while still with Marion

Ms. Frost – a boarder who is a spinster that lives with the Dangerfields to help defray to cost of rent.  She is seduced by Sebastian and feels very terrible and guilty, similar to how she felt when she had premarital sex and ended up in the convent.

Mary – the rough talking and tough acting woman with whom Sebastian ends up.  She want to be an actress to earn some money and she and Sebastian plan a life together.

O’Keefe is a friend of Sebastian’s that tries to move to France, ends up trying out homosexuality, and ends up straight again but sexually frustrated.  He wants to be a chef for Lady Éclair, but she tries to push religion on to him and he doesn’t keep the job.

Percy Clocklan – faked his own death and ended up having lots of money living in London.

• The Ginger Man is based on the fable of the Gingerbread Man who escapes all of his pursuers only to be eaten by a fox that he foolishly trusts. Sebastian Dangerfield intends to suffer no such fate.
• Poverty and Wealth – Born into a wealthy family, Dangerfield is used to having everything he could want but experiences poverty in Ireland where he is a student. , he He lives on credit and runs up bills he can’t afford. Sebastian speaks a wealthy English accent that helps him to receive  credit in shops, but he has no way to ever repay.  He  finds temporary wealth, by pawning (his own or other people’s) possessions, checks from the G.I. Bill, or loans from friends.

Sebastian has questionable friends with values similar to his own.  One friend, O’Keefe,  joins him for a bender using credit to buy food and liquor, and they end up wrecking an already dilapidated and terrible apartment.  Marion is furious with his constant drunkenness. The Dangerfields move to a tiny house in Dublin after their house falls into the sea. They end up in a Dublin apartment where the toilet leaks into the kitchen. Dangerfield is broke, and he and Marion fight nonstop.

Dangerfield has an affair with a laundry worker named Chris.  He goes back to Marion for a while but then reignites the relations with Chris. One day, Dangerfield leaves his fly open exposing himself to lots of people on the train.  When he arrives home, he and Marion have a big fight and she lets him know that she wrote to his father telling him how he mistreats her and their child. Dangerfield is furious, thinking that he’ll be disowned, but his father sends money to Marion.  She threatens to leave him, and Dangerfield gets drunk and smashes up a bar, staying with Chris once again.  Chris realizes that he lied about what transpired to result in his beating and blood.  When Sebastian returns home, he discovers that Marion moved out.

Marion lets Sebastian stay with her in the new home, and they are joined by Lilly Frost to whom they rented a room.  Sebastian continues getting drunk, so Marion, frustrated, takes all the money leaves him (including Ms. Frost’s upcoming rent money).   Sebastian then seduces Ms. Frost whom he ultimately calls Lilly. Sebastian can’t escape his debts and his former landlord follows him, but he gets away with it as usual.  Drunk at a party, Sebastian meets yet another woman, named Mary. He gets her to give him money to move to London, and he leaves Lilly.

In London, Dangerfield hooks up with his old friends and invites Mary to come join him. His father dies, and he expects a big inheritance but discovers that it will be twenty years before he will see a penny of the money. When Sebastian realizes that he won’t have money for a long time, he fights with Mary and drives her away. The novel ends with Sebastian reuniting with an old friend who is now wealthy and Sebastian makes up with Mary and plans for a future with her.