Characters Depicting Alienation of the Protagonists - Essay Example

Alienation of the Protagonists Freud's tripartite breakdown of the personality has a certain flavor of alienation, suggesting as it does the cross-purposes at which the id and super-ego work. Freud derives his "dynamic" coloring from this maneuver. But the alienation met construct is not given the great emphasis in Freudian theory that the more phenomenological Jung was to give it. For Jung, if adequate balance was not maintained, in time a truly alienated aspect of the personality -- the "shadow" -would be formed and make its appearance in the conscious sphere outside the control of consciousness. By ignoring promptings from the unconscious to balance behavior, one can create a personal Frankenstein monster. He begins to act differently, does not know himself anymore, and feels torn by conflicting emotions. Freud would explain these same manifestations as being under the direction of unconscious motives and potentially identifiable as having originated in early experience. Jung believes the roots of many such complexes emerge from the past group identities of the collective unconscious, and that when alienation takes place it is not always a matter of what one has lived; it could be a matter of what one has failed to live, at least consciously. The alienation theme has been used in trying to capture man's plight as a social animal. Adler's man, who fails to evolve social interest. Characters depicting alienation It is unfortunate that Sartre's heroes too often seem to be abstractions created by the author purposely to illustrate men who strive to integrate humanity by committing themselves through an action which is also an abstraction. These characters ultimately fail to become great tragic heroes because of this very abstractness. They are likable puppets, but the human element is too often missing in their characters. Whether the alienation of the heroes of Sartre is as painful as that of other characters in the modern French drama is debatable. These heroes can forget their personal solitude in action, as few other exiles in the contemporary theatre can. But insofar as they are superior men their alienation is more painful to us than that of others because we not only sympathize with their anguish but admire intellectually what they represent. Othello Othello's first appearance in the play is a refutation of slander. In I.ii his conduct in facing Brabantio's party ("Keep up your bright swords . . .") nullifies the "thick lips," the "lascivious Moor," of earlier dialogue and lays a foundation for the council scene in which Othello gains a respect close to veneration. Thus, a deserved reputation, casually sensed by its possessor and pointedly accepted by others, answers the scurrility of Iago and Brabantio. Othello's easy bearing of his good name, his lack of egoistic concern for it, introduces the normal or objective aspect of the reputation theme. Thus, in the first two acts Shakespeare presents his theme in a dramatic triumph by Othello over slander, and in an equally dramatic loss of honor by Cassio which is amplified by strong lyrical expression. In these episodes reputation is asserted within its sound and normal limits. But there is also its inverted aspect; if we return to the beginning of Othello we may follow a parallel stressing of good name in the form of self-regard and prideful delusion. Othello has shown no previous morbidity, but the audience has become "used" to the trait as Iago, obsessed with reputation, has dwelt first ironically and then with malignant conviction upon the rumor about Othello and Emilia. The obsession growing, he has spawned a rumor of his own, the Cassio Desdemona slander, and has suddenly disclosed in soliloquy that he believes it also. In the temptation scene a clearly similar process is enacted with Othello as the victim. As the contrary aspects of reputation meet in a kind of dramatic dialectic, the Captain, tensed by his regard for good name, assumes the previous pattern of the Ancient: first the surmise, then the play of fancy in which slander is confirmed by yet more vivid slander, and finally the delusion. But what of the objection that motives of one character cannot be extended to another One must answer that only a literal theory of motivation confines the psychological quality of a play to case history developments within individual characters. Motivation can be "shared" or distributed, with one role displaying analogy to another, and all roles contributing to a thematic unity based upon a dominant and consistent psychological principle. That a state of mind previously established in Iago is in III.iii assumed by Othello, and that the audience accepts this because it is consistent with the play's psychological mood, is no more surprising in good dramatic art than the supplementing of Macbeth's state of mind by that of Lady Macbeth. Traditionally, the motivation of Othello has been thought to end with his fall in III.iii, and interpreters of the play have seldom assumed that the psychological growth of his role continues through five acts. Another dramatist might have ended the matter with Cassio's beard wiped by the handkerchief, but Shakespeare chooses to begin at this point a last phase of Othello's commitment to Pride, a phase marked throughout by ritual dedication. Very infrequently have symbolic materials been used with greater meaning or with more regard for the requirements of drama. As the strawberry-spotted handkerchief ends Othello's doubt, Shakespeare begins the second half of the tragedy in a changed key. From the point of Othello's near-attack In the character of Othello there is a core of self-knowledge which dramatically replaces delusion at the end, and which, unlike Antony's self-awareness, appears cleanly in a single crisis. Othello's insight into his error is neither chronic nor sentimental. In discussing Shakespeare's characters one is expected, and sometimes tempted, to deal unduly with cause and effect. Certain queries seem inevitable. What is there about Othello which leads him to ritual as an expression of delusion How did Hamlet come to sense that he lacked passion When these questions refer to a character's life before the play begins, they can be dismissed, but they deserve an answer when they are addressed to the text. It would not be irresponsible, for example, to say that Othello assumes a ritual role because formal conduct is part of the military code, or that Hamlet is unsure in emotion because an object of love, his mother, has become unworthy. In each instance the play can carry the explanation. But it can also support several different motives, and it seems to me that a choice among them should be left to the reader. Hamlet's deficiency-in-excess of emotion is announced by Hamlet, it has a cumulative development, and it is a psychological conflict which can be recognized by anyone as part of his experience. The critic should point this out and he may, but need not, specify causal origins and relationships. Of these there are a number; it must be granted that they are important and that one who dismisses them in order to read Hamlet "for fun" probably gets very little fun from thinking. The assumption I have made, however, is that thinking people are happier if they are given the material for thought and allowed to think. The Outsider The hero of The Stranger is not exemplary of or explained by the principles later sketched out by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. The fact that Meursault lives with the indifference of an absurd hero but lacks the consciousness and revolt of the absurd hero, shows us that the philosophical clarity of The Myth is not yet here present. Those who have tried to make a direct correspondence between the novel and the subsequent philosophical essays succeed only in confusing the proper structure of this novel, which deals with the Absurd, but in a manner which is independent of the essays. In this review of the indifference which characterizes Meursault and of that moral absolutism which forcibly crushes him, we come to see that the absurdity which is pictured to us is not that of man before a senseless and fragmentary nature which is foreign to him as a human being; the absurdity is in the attempt of society to justly apply absolute moral standards to the uncertain and chartless course of human life. It is not an absurd universe which destroys Meursault; it is a moral legalism which has injected fixed values into a sphere which has no fixed moral values, i.e., human life. The Myth of Sisyphus has uncovered the divorce between man who desires unity and the world which is in fragmentation both for the intellect and for the immediate personal experience. The Stranger has shown the divorce between the attempt to live honestly in accord with the indeterminate character of human existence and the attempt to interpret that human existence in general moral terms of absolute validity. The Stranger is nearer to the concerns of Noces than to The Myth of Sisyphus. The central act of this short novel is Meursault's murder of the Arab. It is this act which ushers in the whole mechanism of moral legalism and sets up the absurd contrast between what we know Meursault to be and what the court decides that he is. Understand that it is not the murder which is in question during the trial; there is no doubt that Meursault killed the Arab. The question during the trial is whether Meursault's life shows him to be a man who is a "case hardened" criminal. Camus has brought about the perfect absurd situation where Meursault (or anyone) is seen to have lived a life which proves that he is guilty. It is not the murder which proves his guilt; it is his life which proves his guilt. This is to say that any life, placed under the judgment of absolute moral standards is guilty and monstrous. It remains for us to understand clearly that Meursaul, in committing murder, still retains the innocence which has characterized him from the beginning, which is to say, the act of murder was consonant with all of the other actions which indifferently issued from Meursault. Why did Meursault shoot this man whom he did not even know The answer is, in fact, that it was "because of the sun," but there is no way to justify this in a legal proceeding when all acts are explained by willful intentionality. Of one thing we have no doubt: that Meursault's eyes are extremely sensitive to bright light. This is indicated to us no less than fourteen times previous to the murder. Added to this is Meursault's own state of mind during the outing on the beach. During the lunch he had drunk too much wine and was "slightly muzzy." This state of mind is amply suggested during the encounter which Meursault and Raymond had with the Arab a few minutes before the final encounter when Meursault faces the Arab alone: Meursault is a mere automaton in the earlier part of the novel, he eventually grows more complex as he moves from the man of simple responses to one capable of higher thought. Most of the humor in the earlier sections of L'tranger stems from Meursault's inability to get beyond the literal and to think abstractly. This creates a "verbal innocence" because for Meursault everything is unique, and he tries to clarify the obvious. At the trial, for example, he says: "Then Cleste was called. He was announced as a witness for the defense. The defense meant me." Meursault is a stranger because his experience has been almost entirely sentient and, quite comically, the processes of society are new to him: "For the nth time I was asked to give particulars of my identity and, though heartily sick of this formality, I realized it was natural enough; after all, it would be a shocking thing for the court to be trying the wrong man." The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby has become such a classic of American fiction that its avowed literary merits easily obscure those qualities that also made it (and continue to make it) a cult favorite. In a way, the early history of the book is a counterpoint to the history of J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye, with both books ending up as perennial favorites. The difference is that Catcher was a cult favorite first and then a critical success, whereas The Great Gatsby was praised by the critics long before it acquired a cult following. Therefore, although Gatsby fits chronologically into an earlier time frame, one closer to Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe than to Salinger, it somehow caught the attention of a post-WW II audience and acquired a cult following that peaked in the early fifties but has by no means abated. In this respect it is like Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf, Demian, and Siddhartha, books that originally appeared a generation before they gained the cult status that has made their titles household words since the 1960s. At the end of The Great Gatsby there occurs a passage which everyone reads and nobody says much about. Gatsby is dead; the big house at West Egg has been closed and there will be no more parties; Nick Carraway has moved back into New York and found life rather difficult to live. Fitzgerald might have done well to close his novel right here, the story being over and there being little more for Nick to add to his account of his own feelings. But the page goes on: I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all-Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men him in at a house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares. The power of Gatsby's dream blinds Nick to the obvious and his sense of fair play also confuses issues. From people like Tom and Daisy Gatsby has had a bad deal. "'They're a rotten crowd,'! shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'" He adds in the next paragraph that this was the only compliment he ever gave Gatsby, because he "disapproved of him from beginning to end." Possibly the compliment should not be considered a very great one, since it compared Gatsby with people of no high moral quality; but Nick has just said, also, that Gatsby was following some sort of Grail, which is a strong enough expression in the circumstances to make it clear that Nick is not aware of his own moral ambivalence. Nick's sincerity is unexceptionable. He is deeply disturbed by Gatsby's disaster; it becomes his own. Gatsby's death ends a chapter in his own life: he gives up his house, sells his car to the grocer, quits his job, sees Tom and Jordan one last time, and then takes his "provincial squeamishness" back to his home in the Middle West--thus tacking something typically American on a novel which, in general pattern, belongs to the category whose prototype is Balzac Lost Illusions. His dream, as well as Gatsby's, has been shattered-and he finally identifies himself with the myriad young men who have left the shelter of home to discover that life is not so enchanting as they have been brought up to expect. What makes this particular version of a familar theme so specifically American is his laying blame on his having passed from one cultural area to another. Fitzgerald's reader will agree that something in Nick's development has prevented his reaching the moral maturity which would have allowed him to perceive Gatsby's "appalling sentimentality" without falling away into sentimentality himself--as we have seen him do in this prose, which is not only Fitzgerald's style but also Nick's characterizing utterance. Works Cited Berry Berry, "Othello's Alienation", SEL, 30 ( 1990): 315-333, quote at 323. Camus Albert. The Stranger. Paris: 1942; New York: Knopf, 1946. [ Random House, 1989] Fitzgerald F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's, 1925. [ Macmillan, 1981] Rene Girard, "Camus's Stranger retired" Materials Center, Modern Language Association of America (New York) 1966, Arthos John. "The Fall of Othello". Shakespeare Quarterly 9 ( 1968): 93-104. Coates J. B. Coates (1953). The Existentialist Revolt. By Dr Kurt F. Reinhardt.. Philosophy, 28 , pp 183-183 Read More