Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Edition: Great Expectations (A Norton Critical Edition)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Great Expectations was serialized in Dicken’s own periodical All the Year Round in weekly installments from December 1860 to August 1861 (the American serialization in Harper’s actually began a week earlier due to lighter copyright restrictions in America). All the Year Round, unlike his previous periodical, Household Words, gave prime space to serial fiction—this was a successful move for Dickens, as AYR’s circulation ended up greatly exceeding HW’s.  

SUMMARY:

Great Expectations is narrated retrospectively in first-person by Pip, who introduces himself to his reader explaining that he called himself "Pip" because his father's family names was Pirrip, and his Christian name was Philip and as an infant, he couldn't really pronounce either. Early in his life, since he was an orphan, he lived with his sister, the formidable Mrs. Joe Gargery, and her husband Joe, a poor blacksmith whose own upbringing under a tyrannical father who beat him and his mother led to his being particularly mild-mannered before the tyrannical Mrs. Gargery. One day, Pip was at the graveyard looking upon the graves of his parents, when he encounters an escaped convict, who demands that Pip bring him back some "wittles" and a "file" to saw away the iron chain around his leg. Frightened by the man's threats that he will send a young man after him to devour his liver if he fails to obey him, Pip steals food from Mrs. Joe's pantry, saves food from his own dinner, and steals a file from Joe's workshop to take to the man the next day. When he delivers the food and the file the next day, Pip encounters briefly another convict. During the course of Christmas dinner, some soldiers come and tell them that there have been two escaped convicts and that they need Joe's help to repair some broken iron cuffs that they had found. The men at dinner (including Joe, Mr. Wopsle, the church clerk, and Uncle Pumblechook, a relative to Joe, in addition to Pip) go out with other members of the village to seek out these escaped convicts. They are found in the marshes, and Pip watches as "his" convict maintained a hold on the other convict, apparently thinking it good that they had been caught in order that he might turn in this other convict. Pip's convict also frees Pip from suspicion by telling the sergeant that he had stolen food from the Gargery's. The convicts are carried back to the hulks, prison ships bound for Australia.

For the most part, Pip wasn't receiving much of an education, except for when he would go to "learn" from Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. This aunt, however, was often asleep, so really, Pip learned more rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet from a girl named Biddy who worked for her. Eventually, the plan was for Pip to be apprenticed to Joe, but in the meantime, he is summoned to a wealthy old woman named Miss Havisham’s house. Prior to his regular visitations to Miss Havisham’s, Pip encounters a stranger in a pub while with Joe, who has the file which he gave the convict at the beginning of the novel. This stranger gives Pip some money.

At Miss Havisham’s, relatives surround her, fawning on her and clearly interested in her fortune.  Miss Havisham lives with a young beautiful girl named Estella; Pip becomes smitten with her and starts to feel ashamed of his own poverty and lack of education. This, of course, is Miss Havisham’s plan: because her fiancé had left her years ago, out of spite she has brought up Estella as a haughty temptress and torturer of men. Miss Havisham enjoys watching Pip play cards with Estella, and also engages Pip to accompany her on a circular route around a room where she has kept her (decaying, cobwebbed) bridal cake and decorations. All of the clocks in Miss Havisham’s house are set to twenty to nine, the time when her lover left.  One day at Miss Havisham’s, Pip encounters a “pale young gentleman” (later revealed to be Herbert Pocket) who challenges him to a fight. Pip has no choice but to fight, and Pip actually emerges victorious though he feels badly and fears retribution. Retribution doesn’t come, however, and he forgets the incident for the time being. 

Eventually, Miss Havisham allows Pip to be apprenticed to Joe, but having been exposed to Estella, Pip is ashamed of Joe’s illiteracy and desires a better life for himself. He engages Biddy to continue to teach him to write. One day, when Pip is given a half-day off and so is Joe’s surly journeyman, Orlick (who severely dislikes Pip) he goes back to Miss Havisham’s to catch a glimpse of Estella. She is, however, not there. On his return home, Pip finds that Mrs. Gargery has been horribly beat up and close to death. Mrs. Gargery is revived, but she is now basically an invalid. The weapon left beside her seemed to Pip to be the convict in the graveyard’s iron, but Pip doesn’t say anything. Orlick is a suspect because of a recent quarrel with Mrs. Gargery, but for the time being, they cannot find out the suspect.

About four years into his apprenticeship, Pip is met with a lawyer named Mr. Jaggers who informs him that Pip has an unknown benefactor who has intentions of making Pip into a gentleman. The one condition is that Pip should not seek to find out who the benefactor is. Pip, of course, thinks it is Miss Havisham and Miss Havisham has no qualms in making those around her believe this to be true in order to inspire their jealousies. Pip is to go to London to study under a tutor named Matthew Pocket; Pip associates this name readily with one Sarah Pocket often at Miss Havisham’s so his suspicions that Miss Havisham is his benefactor are strengthened. Pip has also seen Jaggers at Miss Havisham’s before. Armed with “great expectations,” Pip becomes a proud figure before Biddy, who has come to live with them since her great aunt Wopsle died, and Joe. Pip’s retrospective narrative perpetuates an ironic distance between the Pip excitedly making his preparations to go to London (going to the tailor and buying new clothes) and the mature narrator-Pip. The first volume closes with Pip setting off for London in a stage-coach.

In London, Pip is met by the son of Matthew Pocket, Herbert, whom he recognizes as the pale young gentleman. Later, Pip finds that his tutor (who lives in the suburbs) has a rather difficult wife, who resents that he is a private tutor, fancying herself royalty by birth. The Pockets have a household of children that Mrs. Pocket basically neglects; nurses pick up the slack. There are two other pupils of Matthew’s, Bentley Drummle, of baronet origins, and Startop. Pip soon decides to take up as Herbert’s London roommate in Barnard’s Inn and the two become great friends. Herbert is a bit naïve as far as making money goes; he wishes to become an insurance magnate but doesn’t seem to have much idea as to how to go about this. Meanwhile, Pip becomes better acquainted with Wemmick, Jaggers’s clerk who seems all business while in London, but allows Pip a look into his private life during Pip’s visit to his cottage which indicates that he is man of depth and feeling. Wemmick has made his dwellings meticulously charming and self-sufficient apart from the whirling world of London, and there, he takes care of his aged parent. Pip also visits Jaggers’s home, and gains no such knowledge of any sort of inner depth to the lawyer—Jaggers manipulates Pip and his companions (Drummle, Startop, and Herbert) to share more than they should about themselves at dinner while he himself remains tight-lipped about himself. Jaggers is every inch the professional and does all that he can to eliminate the humanity and the personal in his interactions with others. There is a mysterious female housekeeper at Jaggers’s who seems very afraid of him. Oddly, Jaggers shows to the dinner party her mangled wrists and says something about the strength of her hands.

One day, Joe comes to inform Pip that Miss Havisham would like to see him. On his way back to his hometown, Pip shares a coach with the stranger who had given him money in the public house and overhears that the money had been from the convict that he had seen in the graveyard. Pip decides to stay at a hotel instead of with Joe, and there he sees in the newspapers that Pumblechook has been opportunistically telling everyone that he had been Pip’s mentor in the past. Pip still harbors the great expectation that he will get to marry Estella and again he is disappointed when he sees her again. Miss Havisham offers no promises, and Pip has a strange interaction with Estella in which she informs him that she has no heart. Back in London, Pip confesses his love for Estella to Herbert, who gives him the good advice that maybe he should’t set too much on just “expectations.” Herbert and Pip attend a production of Hamlet (which Pip has heard about from Joe) featuring none other than Mr. Wopsle who has given up his religious occupation for acting. The next day, Estella writes him to tell him that Miss Havisham wants him to accompany her from London to Richmond. Pip of course obeys but nothing comes of his “expectations.”

Meanwhile, Pip and Herbert are getting into debts and the two of them, since neither of them are good at managing their practical monetary affairs, crunch numbers to very little purpose. Pip gets a note letting him know that Mrs. Gargery has finally died and he goes home for her funeral. The reunion with Joe and Biddy is bittersweet, and when he leaves and promises to be back more often, Biddy expresses her doubts and Pip feels her to be harsh even though she is probably correct.

When Pip reaches his twenty-first birthday, he begins to get a direct income of 500 pounds a year from his unknown benefactor. Pip decides to anonymously use his money to set up Herbert as a partner in a merchant business with a man named Clarikker. Estella, now established in London at the house of one Mrs. Brandley’s, receives visits from many suitors, Pip included. She doesn’t treat him as she does other suitors, however, telling him that she deliberately doesn’t deceive him like the others. Drummle emerges as more and more of a likely match for Estella. Two years later, at midnight one night, Pip’s convict shows up at his apartment for shelter. Pip learns that he is called Magwitch, and that he was his true benefactor, having earned money in Australia as a sheep farmer and feeling for the little boy who had once done him a kindness. Pip hides Magwitch (now under the name Uncle Provis) and involves Herbert. When Magwitch tells his life story to Pip, they realize that the other convict in the marshes, Compeyson, who betrayed Magwitch was also Miss Havisham’s betraying lover through a connection to her half brother Arthur. Pip is crushed by all of this information, decides that he should no longer use the money of his benefactor, and goes to Miss Havisham’s Satis House one more time to say good-bye to Estella before thinking to renounce his chances with her forever. At Miss Havisham’s, Pip learns that Estella has finally been engaged to Drummle. Miss Havisham seems to pity him, weirdly, but this is no solace. Pip walks all the way from Satis House to London, where he receives a note from a porter near his apartment from Wemmick warning him not to go home. The next day, Wemmick tells him that Compeyson is in London seeking Magwitch. Herbert has removed Magwitch to his intended Clara’s house, where she lives with her drunk father. Herbert and Pip plan to help Magwitch escape on the river and Pip buys a rowboat for the purpose. At the theater one night, Mr. Wopsle tells Pip that he saw Compeyson (recognizing his face from the night of Magwitch’s struggle with him in the marshes) behind him; Pip realizes that Compeyson is onto him.

More mysteries are solved for Pip when he goes to dine with Jaggers one day: Magwitch is actually Estella’s father and Jaggers’s housekeeper is Estella’s mother. Apparently she had strangled a woman to death and Jaggers had defended her successfully and set up her child, Estella, with Miss Havisham. Pip goes to Miss Havisham to confirm the story and finds her in an apologetic state. Before Pip can stop her, she has set herself on fire out of remorse. Pip manages to rescue her though she becomes an invalid. Back in London, Herbert nurses Pip back to health from his burns, and soon afterwards, Wemmick gives the signal that they should attempt to smuggle Magwitch out of town on the following Wednesday. Pip receives an anonymous summons from someone threatening his “Uncle Provis” if he did not meet them at the sluice-house near the lime-kilns near his native town by the marshes. Pip impulsively follows the note, feeling responsible for Magwitch and is unfortunately seized by Orlick at the sluice house who, before killing Pip, confesses the murder of his sister as well. Luckily, Pip is rescued by Herbert and Startop, who have found the note and rushed over.

Back in London, they attempt the escape. Unfortunately, they are caught by a galley that demands the surrender of Magwitch. Magwitch sees a man on the galley and rips off the wrap covering his face, revealing Compeyson. Pip’s boat capsizes, and Magwitch and Compeyson wrestle in the water as a steamer passes over them. Compeyson is drowned, but Magwitch emerges alive though badly wounded. In prison, Magwitch is sentenced to death. He dies before his execution however, and Pip doesn’t reveal to him that his fortune has been confiscated so that he might die thinking he has made Pip a gentleman.

At the end of the novel, Herbert’s firm does well enough for him to establish an Eastern branch in Cairo. He asks Pip to go with him to be his clerk, but before he accepts, Pip goes to his hometown once again, hoping to marry Biddy, realizing at long last that she was the one whom he should have loved from the first. He is shocked to discover, however, that she and Joe had married. Pip, Biddy, and Joe reconcile as Pip asks for their forgiveness for his pride and blindness. They graciously tell him that there is nothing to forgive.

Pip goes off with Herbert and successfully makes a living, returning eleven years later to find Biddy and Joe with a child named Pip. Pip has heard that Drummle has died, having treated Estella badly during their marriage. In the (unpublished) original ending, she has remarried a doctor, and he runs into her in London where she is in a carriage. Little Pip is with Pip, and she assumes he is his son and Pip doesn’t correct her. Pip says that she seemed changed and that “the suffering had been stronger than Miss Havinsham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.” The revised ending was more sentimental: Pip meets Estella back at the abandoned Satis House, and Estella reveals how she has changed in dialogue with Pip. They resolve, at the end, to part as friends, and as Pip watches her leave, he says he sees “the shadow of no parting but one” in the serial version (signaling the shadow of death), but cancels “but one” in the volume edition. 

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:

One of the most commented on and interesting features of the narrative is Pip’s first-person retrospective account. Because it is a retrospective account delivered by a mature narrator who feels quite differently than the Pip he is describing at each stage of his story, a number of more complicated narrative effects are enabled. I will discuss two in particular here: first, the retrospective first-person account enables a narrative of withholding, and second, it enables a narrative which constantly ironizes and undermines Pip’s younger self.  

Withholding begins with the very first scene, in which the narrator Pip styles the Magwitch graveyard scene as if it is a random episode from the younger Pip’s life. The fact that it ends up being a kind of originary scene for Pip’s bildungsroman is withheld basically until the revelation that Pip’s benefactor was Magwitch. Also withheld is the significance of the unnamed town near the marshes which Pip grows up in: in the context of the global network, it turns out to be an important stop which connect the empire (significant because of convict deportation to Australia) to London which is further inland (I’m indebted to Jonathan Grossman’s reading of Great Expectations and transport networks here).

Pip’s depiction of his younger self is severely ironic especially when he narrates how he treats Biddy and Joe once he goes to Miss Havisham’s and begins to have “expectations.” The mature narrator makes the reader complicit in critiquing the young Pip. This early irony has a larger significance, however, when we consider the how the novel is really in the end about how his “great expectations” fail to become more than just “expectations.” The title itself becomes a bittersweet, ironic commentary on upward social mobility: a convict with the best of intentions fails at vicariously moving up on the social ladder through Pip even when he ends up with a lot of money.

Ultimately, there is something incredibly imprisoning and limiting about the entire (global) network of social relations where its players are constantly unable to exert agency to bring about the fruition of their hopes or expectations. And, it isn’t just Pip and Magwitch who get trapped—Estella is the other obvious example of a character who becomes trapped by circumstances which she is largely powerless over. The only characters who can finally live out “good lives” are those who essentially live without expectations of upward mobility or ambitions to live better: Biddy and Joe are one such example, and Wemmick is another. Biddy and Joe are content to live in the town near the marshes without knowing any more about the outside world than is necessary for a peaceful domestic life—when Pip tries to reveal more to Joe, he says that he would rather not know. Wemmick’s home away from his professional life similarly shows him extricating himself from the networks in which he cannot be but a partially blind agent: at his private cottage, though humble, he controls everything from food production (he has livestock and gardens) to the drawbridge which shuts his cottage out from the outside world every evening.

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Edition: The Way We Live Now (Oxford World's Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Trollope's The Way We Live Now was published in twenty monthly parts between 1874 to 1875 (serialization in parts was, by this time, anachronistic). The title references contemporary discussions on whether society was improving from a moral point of view or degenerating. Trollope's Autobiography situates his own commentary alongside that of contemporaries like Carlyle and Ruskin. Also in the Autobiography, Trollope writes that as he "ventured to take the whip of the satirist" in writing The Way We Live Now, he found himself satirizing more than just the "iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody," but also "intrigues of girls who want to get married, the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and...the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes." Reception of Trollope's novel was actually fairly negative, critics often charging it with poor form, despite current views of the work as possibly his best--more on this in the critical analysis section (Source: Lindsay Sullivan, LitEncyc). 

SUMMARY:

The novel begins with three letters written by Lady Carbury to three editors: Mr. Broune of the "Morning Breakfast Table," Mr. Booker of the "Literary Chronicle," and Mr. Alf of the "Evening Pulpit." She has recently completed a book called Criminal Queens and wishes for favorable reviews. Lady Carbury is a widow, whose son Sir Felix squandered away his inheritance, spending much of his time gambling and dining at the Beargarden club. Lady Carbury has high hopes, however, that Sir Felix will marry Marie Melmotte, the daughter of Mr. Augustus Melmotte, a wealthy financier of foreign origins with a "Bohemian Jewess" as a wife, and who had settled comfortably into the society of Grosvenor Square within a single year. Although it seems that the Melmottes have come to their money in shady ways (there were rumors of their being kicked out of Paris), all the important members of the aristocracy (including the Prince himself!) attend Madame Melmotte's ball. At the ball, Sir Felix makes some overtures towards Marie, though he isn't particularly enthusiastic: Marie is rather plain and unremarkable, after all. After the ball, Lady Carbury berates her daughter, Henrietta, for dancing with Paul Montague, a young man without immediate fortunes, but who is a partner along with his uncle and an American named Mr. Fisker at an investment firm. Lady Carbury wants Henrietta to marry Roger Carbury, a forty-year old cousin who owns a large country estate--in a word, a figure of "old money" who finds the wealth of "new money" like Melmotte's to be of disreputable character.

Roger Carbury and Paul Montague are also distantly related, and Roger has been something of a guardian figure for Paul in the absence of his deceased father and mother. The two are both in love with Henrietta, and so their relationship became strained. Henrietta has not admitted to loving Paul, but she steadily refuses Roger, telling him that she only likes him as a cousin. Meanwhile, Lady Carbury tries to get Roger to help her to regulate Felix's reckless gambling, but Felix is disrespectful to both his mother and Roger. Paul's partner Fisker has suddenly come to England, having decided independently of Paul that he wished to engage Melmotte in an investment scheme for a new railroad from San Francisco to Vera Cruz. Fisker uses Paul to get an invitation to see Melmotte, who ends up agreeing to putting his name to the scheme, since it is understood that he would not really be investing in the railroad per se but merely aiding in floating the shares of the railroad. Melmotte inspires confidence amongst other investors, and the scheme takes off, and ostensibly, the men will make money by puffing up the railroad and selling their shares for profit. Before leaving to go back to San Francisco, Fisker attends the Beargarden club and wins some money from gambling. Because Fisker clearly doesn't take the claims of I.O.U.s very seriously, he is happy to leave without collecting money from his English friends, but many of the Englishmen are anxious to send him off with something more than I.O.Us. The English lords manage to get together some money nevertheless.

Lady Carbury soon receives some bad news: Mr. Alf has allowed one of his staff to write an exceedingly crushing review of her book (this is, however, what Mr. Alf does because only bad reviews sell). The review points out all of the historical inaccuracies of her work. Mr. Broune and Mr. Booker, however, have done their duty and praised her book. To keep up appearances, Lady Carbury still extends an invitation to Mr. Alf to come to her house along with other literati. Mr. Alf makes as if he didn't know that such a review would be published, but this too is keeping up appearances. Lady Carbury writes to visit with Roger Carbury at Whitsuntide, largely because she has heard that the Melmottes will be visiting the Longestaffe's who live in an estate near Roger's. It seems that the Longestaffes have run into some money troubles, and are trying to get the Melmottes to buy one of their properties, the Pickering Estate. Dolly (Adolphus) Longestaffe, Mr. Longestaffe's son, is resistant to the idea. We find out later that the Longestaffes are in a much worse position than might be supposed at first; Mr. Longestaffe says they must give up their London townhouse. When Georgiana Longstaffe, his younger daughter, throws a fit because she will not be able to participate in London life during the "season" and hence will not be able to secure a husband, he agrees that she may go live with the Melmottes when in London (even though she declares them "vulgar"). 

When Roger's relatives arrive, he gives a dinner party, his choice of guests showing something of his independent character--he tries to bring together a Protestant Bishop and Roman Catholic priest. Sir Felix arrives at the Carbury estate as well, urged on by his mother to make inroads with Marie. Though Felix does in fact make some progress as far as winning Marie Melmotte goes, he also takes the opportunity of being at Carbury to meet up with Ruby Ruggles, a previous love interest who lives with her grandfather at Sheep's Acre nearby. Her grandfather wishes her to be engaged to John Crumb, a sort of country bumpkin but a good man whom Ruby shuns in favor of the good-looking, city-mannered Sir Felix. When Sir Felix gets up the courage to ask Melmotte for Marie's hand in marriage, Melmotte shoots off a barrage of questions at Felix as to his financial matters, and the conversation does not go well for Felix because he has nothing more than his baronet title. Melmotte has decided his daughter will be engaged to Lord Nidderdale, son of a Marquis. When Felix finds out that others involved with the railway are selling shares in order to profit, he thinks that he too would like to do so, perhaps by using the I.O.U.s he won from gambling to purchase shares. 

Though Paul Montague is partial to Hetta Carbury, he has had a prior relation with one Mrs. Hurtle, an American widower, who causes trouble for him because she has followed him to London. It turns out that Paul had once been engaged to her, before hearing rumors about her having shot a man in Oregon, and of her husband potentially still being alive. Mrs. Hurtle is clearly a savvy woman, and she manages to guilt Paul into spending time with her.  Marie, her heart won by Felix, tells him that even if her father resists the marriage, she actually has some money of her own that he had put in her name for his own financial security. She is confident that should they run away, she might draw from this stash. Meanwhile, Lady Carbury also trues to make inroads with Melmotte by introducing him to her editor friends trying to suggest that she might of help to him in making these introductions; Melmotte pays very little attention to her machinations. Lady Carbury, though, gets her own proposal from Mr. Broune, whom she rejects (on second thought, Mr. Broune is relieved when he sees just how dissipated and irresponsible Sir Felix is). At Sheep's Acre, Ruby rejects John Crumb's proposal for marriage, and her grandfather beats her, resulting in Ruby running away to live with her Aunt Pipkin in London. There, she has further liaisons with Sir Felix.  

Meanwhile, Melmotte's financial success means that he will welcome the Emperor of China to his house for dinner and a party. People fight for tickets to these events, and Melmotte is pretty much at the apex of his power and influence, though some still consider him "vulgar," including Lady Monogram, who snubs her friend Georgiana for living with them. At a Board Meeting, however, Melmotte's shady dealings are underscored when he doesn't let Paul speak out his objections and reservations about the ethicality of their investments. He even tries to bribe Paul but this scheme fails. After the meeting, he gets Felix to sign away rights to Marie, promising that in return, he would help make Felix some money. The Longestaffe's Pickering Estate is sold to Melmotte, which he intends for Marie and Nidderdale after they get married. Back, briefly, to the Hetta, Paul, Mrs. Hurtle storyline, Paul finds Ruby Ruggles when he goes to visit with Mrs. Hurtle--it turns out that both women are lodging with Mrs. Pipkin. Paul reports Ruby to Roger Carbury, and resolves to himself that he will let Mrs. Hurtle go. This turns out to be ineffectual because Mrs. Hurtle is really good at guilt-tripping him; instead, Paul agrees to take her to Lowestoffe, a seaside town, on account of her health. Unfortunately, at Lowestoffe, they run into Roger Carbury, who is angry at Paul for Hetta's sake. 

Marie soon convinces Felix to run away with her to New York; Felix agrees, despite the waiver he has just signed. The plan is to meet in Liverpool after getting their separately. Marie and her maid, Didon, make it onto the train to Liverpool, but they are intercepted--Marie is sent home and Didon takes the opportunity to continue onwards and move on from the Melmotte family. Felix, on the other hand, doesn't keep his side of the bargain because he got drunk and gambled the night away. Melmotte's success continues to grow, to the point where he actually runs for the Westminster Conservative seat in Parliament against Mr. Alf, the editor of the "Evening Pulpit." At Melmotte's dinner for the Emperor, however, several important attendees cancel at the last minute, largely because of some fresh rumors circulating of a potential forgery he had committed. These rumors were precipitated by Dolly Longestaffe, who has employed a new laywer, Mr. Squercum (his father's lawyers are Bideawhile and Sloe, not unexpectedly, rather useless), to look into a title-deed for Pickering which he did not sign but which yet had his signature on it. At the party following the dinner, the Emperor leaves early, and other guests take the cue and do so as well. Melmotte's downfall now seems impending, but he maintains his cool. 

Georgiana Longestaffe is busy meanwhile, engaging herself to a Jewish banker named Brehgert.  Mr. and Mrs. Longestaffe are horrified, and they forbid her engagement. In the end, Georgiana loses Brehgert. Montague finally having cast off Mrs. Hurtle, proposes to Hetta, but unfortunately, when visiting Ruby at Mrs. Pipkin's, Sir Felix learns about Paul's prior engagement to Mrs. Hurtle, and tells Hetta before Paul has told her. Sir Felix soon runs into his own troubles, however, when he goes out with Ruby again, and encounters John Crumb, who, fancying Ruby in trouble, beats Felix to a pulp. Crumb is arrested, and Felix carted off to recover at his mother's home. Hetta seeks advice from Roger, who tells her to go ask Montague herself. In an exchange of letters, Paul tries to explain himself to Hetta but to no avail--Hetta rejects him. Ruby, finally, is forced to accept Crumb, finally, when her aunt and Mrs. Hurtle contrive a plan in which she either accepts Crumb, or has to seek service as a nursemaid and live off of her own means  

A rather humorous scene depicts Melmotte's first time in Parliament, in which he breaks a bunch of procedural rules and is clearly unfit for the role. Feeling the crunch from Dolly's investigations, and the fall in the value of his railway stocks as a result of plummeting confidence in his schemes, Melmotte tries to convince Marie to sign over her money to him. She refuses, and Melmotte commits yet another set of forgeries, signing for Marie and his own clerk, Herr Croll. People start defecting from Melmotte, and despite the greater and greater certainty that he will be arrested for his forgeries, he remains adamant about keeping up appearances in an almost heroic fashion. Marie, her father's daughter, also perseveres, visiting Lady Carbury and Felix to see if Felix might still marry him even when it is fairly clear that Melmotte's ruin would soon be a reality and not a rumor. The Carburys snub her. In Melmotte's final "performance" before the House, he gets up to address Parliament, but being drunk, falls over. Later that night, he is found dead, having ingested Prussic acid. Nidderdale is one of the first outsiders to find out about Melmotte's death because Marie asks him to come over. Dolly and the lawyers, Squercum, Bideawhile, and Sloe, find out about death when they arrive for a meeting with Melmotte. Nidderdale helps Marie and mother get in contact with lawyers, but everyone else pretty much leaves the two of them to fend for themselves. 

Paul appeals to Roger for help with Hetta and Roger begrudgingly gives it. Hetta decides in the end to see Mrs. Hurtle, who, in speaking badly of Paul's treatment of herself, actually vindicates him to Hetta. This is her giving in, and a testimony to her strength, since Paul hasn't really been fair to her, shunning her primarily because of rumors in the first place. The rest of the novel feels like the tying up of "loose ends." Mr. Melmotte's debts are settled, Hamilton Fisker returns for a visit and makes inroads with Madame and Marie, eventually asking Marie to marry him. Paul decides to dissolve his share of the partnership with Fisker, and finally reconciles with Hetta and are engaged. Ruby and Crumb get married, and Georgiana finally settles on running away with a clergyman. The Bear Garden Club is closed for good. Mrs. Hurtle does manage to have a final interview with Paul, in which she again demonstrates her continuing influence on him--it is clear, at this point, that Paul isn't really capable of handling someone as complicated as Mrs. Hurtle, the innocent Hetta is probably the better match. Madame Melmotte engages herself to Herr Croll, Melmotte's clerk, and the whole lot of them--Marie, Fisker, Madame, Croll, and Mrs. Hurtle set sail for New York. Marie, having learned her lessons in love, makes sure to tell Fisker that their engagement is contingent on how she feels about his financial situation once she has seen his houses in San Francisco. Back in London, Lady Carbury finally accepts Mr. Broune when he proposes again. In a sort of odd chapter which seems to stand entirely on its own, apparently Lady Carbury has been writing a novel called "The Wheel of Fortune" this entire time. Mr. Broune reads it and encourages her not to continue writing. Mr. Broune really seems to have taken over everything for Lady Carbury at this point, even arranging for Felix to go abroad with a clergyman to Germany so that he will stay out of trouble. The novel ends with the happiness of Hetta and Paul, and Roger's decision to settle his estate on the couple, promising Hetta's son Carbury as his willful act of continuing to love her, though as a father-figure. 

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:

John Sutherland does a detailed analysis of The Way We Live Now's serialization and Trollope's writing schedule (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37:3). A few of the key points are that Trollope worked on a really tight calendar (pretty much completing the entire manuscript in approximately 30 weeks), didn't go back to for  revision as a result, and that although he kept to strict metrics (unlike Dickens and Thackeray) in that he wrote exactly 100 chapters, with 5 to each number, and later 50 per volume, a comparison between his plans and the eventual publication shows Trollope's flexibility in decisions as far as plot and character development go. 

With respect to this last point, one particularly striking example of his improvisational methods was his decision, fairly late in his writing process, to kill off Melmotte. Sutherland shows Trollope's decision as not only having to do with considerations of dramatic or novelistic effects but also plot considerations, in this case, whether or not to avoid a trial scene. Overall, the flexibility evident from a work that came out so quickly offers an interesting view into what plot lines and characters Trollope takes up, even if not part of the original plan. Sutherland points out that there were originally three main theaters for Trollope's social commentary, but that the third one ended up overshadowing the other two. They are: 1) the publishing and literary world, kicked off by the novel's beginning with Lady Carbury and her "scene"; 2) the religious and political landscape of the countryside, as represented by the long section on the Carbury and Longestaffe estates during Whitsuntide; and finally, 3) the corrupt world of social climbing via the new professions in finance in London embodied by Melmotte. If there is a "hero" (or anti-hero) of The Way We Live Now, it has to be Melmotte because he is hands down the most psychologically complex and interesting character in the novel, and it seems Trollope knew it, in allowing Melmotte's theater to overshadow the others. Trollope's decision, when commissioning a cover for the monthly issues, to have the picture illustrate Melmotte's rise and fall seems to show a clear awareness of Melmotte's imaginative impact. (Roger, by contrast, seems hopelessly and disturbingly bland, even if meant as the most moral agent in the work). 

I want to focus then, on a couple of passages on Melmotte that struck me as particularly revealing of how Trollope generates interest in him beyond his serving as an object of his "satirizing whip." The first is from the narrator's psychological explication of Melmotte as he contemplates his nearly certain downfall:

"Judging of himself, as though he were standing outside himself and looking on to another man's work, he pointed out to himself his own shortcomings...No idea ever crossed his mind of what might have been the result had he lived the life of an honest man. Though he was inquiring into himself as closely as he could, he never even told himself that he had been dishonest. Fraud and dishonesty had been the very principle of his life, and had so become a part of his blood and bones that even in this extremity of his misery he made no question within himself as to his right judgment in regard to them."

This description of Melmotte says that he possesses a completely different and radical system of morality than everyone else and that he simply cannot think himself out of his warped system. "Fraud and dishonesty" are so ingrained in him that they are normal, everyday operations. As far as such operations go, Melmotte actually does a pretty good job of being objective about how well he performs these operations; he's able to "stand outside himself" and "point out to himself his own shortcomings." This reflexivity is a trait which most other characters sorely lack. Though Melmotte's reflexivity is limited to his warped outlook on what constitutes the norm for morality, it works rather well as far as the operations of his own out-of-joint system go. This internal portrait of Melmotte as essentially different from everyone else seems strongly suggestive of madness, a concept which the narrator ponders in an extended passage on madness and suicide later on. Essentially, the narrator points out that no one says Melmotte is "mad," only because they don't find the reasons that he kills himself to be sympathetic from a conventional point of view (because, in this view, he brought about his own downfall). But what if, as I think the description of his radical difference (and even embodied difference, as suggested by the blood and bones) in orientation towards morality suggests, his madness is this difference, which he has no power to control or get outside of? Thus, the passage above seems in a way to exonerate more than condemn Melmotte. And finally, is there not something clearly seductive and heroic (yet full of pathos) attached to Melmotte's death, as depicted by the following lines? "Drunk as he had been,--more drunk as he probably became during the night,--still he was able to deliver himself from the indignities and penalties to which the law might have subjected him by a dose of prussic acid." In the words I have italicized, the narrator seems to go into free-indirect discourse, directly sympathizing with Melmotte's sense of "indignities" and "penalties," rather than with everyone else who would probably call these things "justice." 

   

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

Edition: Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Voyage in the Dark was Jean Rhys's third published novel, appearing in 1934 (but set in 1914, unlike her previous two novels which reflected contemporaneous times). The novel features portions from an earlier unpublished novel, Triple Sec. Rhys's original ending was to have Anna die, but her publisher thought this was too dark.

SUMMARY:
The novel is narrated in four parts first-person by eighteen-year-old Anna Morgan, who spent her childhood on the island of Dominica in the West Indies. She now lives in England as a touring actress with uncertain work opportunities. She begins with an account of her difficulty settling in England, where she always felt cold, and the towns seemed always alike, drab, and dark. At the opening of the novel, she lives with Maudie, an actress of twenty-eight years old. One day, she and Maudie meet two men on the street who work in "the city," signaling that they are pretty well-off. Anna becomes involved with one of them, Walter Jeffries. She becomes fairly attached to him even though she sees him only intermittently. He gives her money with which she is able to buy new clothes, and also takes care of her when she is sick. Anna is disappointed that she won't spend her birthday with him, because her birthday falls on a Sunday when he won't be around. Instead, she goes out with Maudie, who advises that Anna get as much money out of him as possible.

Walter introduces her to his cousin, Vincent, who connects her with a singing instructor. Patronizingly, Walter tells Anna that she should "get on" and that he would like to help her. One night, when drunk, Anna tells Walter of Dominica--of her father, a list of slaves which she had once seen, their church services--but he isn't too interested. Anna's stepmother Hester visits London, and shows Anna a letter from her uncle back in Dominica berating Hester for not sharing her deceased father's wealth with her. Hester doesn't respect Anna's uncle because he drinks, and because he has fathered many illegitimate children with natives. She reveals too that she feel she has done right by Anna. Anna tells Hester that she does not need her help and can do on her own, thinking she can depend on walter. Hester brings back many home memories to Anna; she thinks especially fondly of a native caretaker, Francine, whom she remembers eating mangoes and telling her stories. Soon, Walter decides to take Anna to the countryside with Vincent and his girl, Germaine. The trip is cut short because Germaine argues with Vincent. Anna is silent for much of the conversations, and the three of them often talk about her as if she is not there, infantilizing her. In one moment of anger, Anna smashes a cigarette but on Walter's hand, but she is sorry for it afterwards.

Walter eventually tires of Anna and drops her, charging Vincent with writing her an impersonal and patronizing letter telling her that he is "sure she is a nice girl" and that she should, simply move on. Walter has promised, however, to take care of her financially should it be necessary. Crushed, Anna sort of floats from one thing to another. She first runs into a woman named Ethel Matthews, a masseuse, who offers her to share rooms with her and to earn her keep as a manicurist. Anna also runs into Laurie, another of her actress friends, who introduces her to two men, Carl and Joe. Carl eventually pursues her, and they sleep together, but it turns out that Carl has a wife and must leave. Anna then spends one night with an unnamed man with a bandaged wrist, by whom she accidentally gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Ethel has decided to drop Anna because she has not really been a good business partner; Ethel writes a letter to Laurie telling her that Anna owes her money. Laurie takes care of Anna and suggest that she write to Walter to get money for an abortion. Walter sends Vincent over, who gives her the money but also asks for the letters that Walter has sent her back. Anna is sickly during her pregnancy and eventually gets a abortion; the whole ordeal occurs in a sort of haze for Anna, amidst more nightmarish memories of the Caribbean such as of being frightened of zombies and soucriants (devil women).

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Rhys's Voyage in the Dark bears some similarities to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (Rhys had a brief affair with Ford Madox Ford in 1924) in that it features a first-person narrator writing in such a way as to suggest an absence of artifice or pre-meditated structure. Both narrators write as if their words flow freely from them with very little sense of constructing a coherent story.

The form of Rhys's novel is significantly more radical, however. While the narrator of The Good Soldier gives a reason for the fragmented nature of his account--he is writing because of a retrospective psychological need to do so in order to deal with the trauma of his botched relationships--it isn't clear how or why Anna is writing her fragmented first-person account. Presumably, the account is also retrospective (in past tense), but it really feels more like she is speaking of what happens to her pretty much as it happens to her. The associations that she makes between her surroundings and what happens to her and her childhood experiences in Dominica give the narration a sense that somehow she is able to communicate to us what feelings and associations she had in the moment of her experiences. There is a strange tension, then, between the apparent lack of artifice in Anna's account, and the necessity of this being a crafted retrospective account in order for it to make sense as to when she would have the opportunity of writing. After all, Anna seems to passively allow things to happen to her and different people to come into her life, and the assertive act of writing hardly seems in keeping with the passive affect which her simple diction, flash-backs, associations, and stream of consciousness writing calls up.

And what are we to make of Anna's inclusions of letters--from Vincent, her uncle, and Ethel? It seems the first-person narrator is doing some kind of scrapbooking, which also seems pretty inconsistent with the Anna who describes finding the greatest relief in sleep. Finally, just to add one more complication to the notion of the narrative as a telling-as-it-happens first-person account: how would Anna have narrated her own death in Rhys's original version?

Perhaps these difficulties suggest a need to suspend disbelief, to recognize that it is not important that Anna probably couldn't have written this account. What simply accepting that we're able to enter into her first-person consciousness as things happen to her does is to allow us access to the impressions of an individual normally evacuated of all agency in telling her own story: the young, emigrant, working class chorus girl. This is partly Rhys's unusual recovery of her own autobiographical past (as she was from Dominica, and worked as a chorus girl for a time), not as a retrospectively constructed, reflective account which is the most "usual" type of memoir, but as a re-imagining of what that life was like as it was being lived.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Edition: The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Age of Innocence was first serialized in the Pictorial Review from July to October, 1920. The Pictorial Review was begun in 1899, originally intended as primarily a fashion magazine to showcase dress patterns, and henceforth a popular women's magazine. Interestingly, Wharton's proposal to New York editors for the novel was much more sensationalistic than the novel ended up being, promising lovers that "go off secretly...and meet in Florida where they spend a few mad weeks." The editors paid her $1800 for the serial rights--this episode illustrates the changing times of the literary press and the kinds of demands expected of literature that would sell.

SUMMARY:
The novel begins with an old New York opera house production of Faust in the 1870s. The families involved in this novel are the "old money" New Yorkers for whom meticulous and mincing distinctions of pedigree and taste were the primary determiners of life. Several respected men of society notice the improprieties of Ellen Olenska, a cousin to the Welland's and Mingott families who had made a bad marriage to a Polishman and had come from Europe to live with her relatives. It was inappropriate that she should be out at all. Newland Archer, the young man engaged to the beautiful May Welland, observes the men observing, and goes over to his betrothed's box in an effort to support their introduction of Ellen into "nice" society. After the opera, they attend a ball at the Beaufort's (Mr. Beaufort is a banker who has a dubious reputation with women and Mrs. Beaufort turns a blind eye). Ellen is not at the ball, and society is thankful that she has had the tact to refrain from appearing there. There, Newland and May announce their engagement.

Newland finds himself increasingly drawn to Ellen, and defensive of what people perceive as her eccentric and foreign actions. Things come to a head when the Lovell-Mingotts plan a dinner to introduce Ellen to polite society: everyone declines the invite. Newland appeals to his relatives, the respected van der Luydens, who help Newland out by giving a dinner in honor of an illustrious visiting relative, a Duke, and inviting Ellen. Society acquiesces, and because the van der Luydens entertain so rarely, everyone comes. In the meantime, Ellen's "eccentricities" include a frankness with men which the polite old New Yorkers deemed scandalous. She tells Newland to call on her, and he finds himself doing so. Beaufort and the Duke also become her regular consorts. In an impulsive gesture, Newland sense Ellen a bunch of yellow roses, anonymously.

Newland doesn't have a profession, because as a gentleman, he need not work. Nevertheless, he does some work as a lawyer purely as a luxurious occupation. When Ellen reveals to her relatives that she wishes to get a divorce from the Count her husband, Newland's future in-laws charge him with handling the case and getting Ellen to reject such notions. Newland is successful, revealing to Ellen the delicacies of avoiding scandal in New York society. Newland doesn't realize this at the time, but Ellen really agrees out of kindness to Newland and not out of fear for her own name. Later, at the theater, Newland's feelings for Ellen come to the surface as he watches a scene of parting between an actor and an actress in the play "The Shaugraun." He imagines Ellen and himself in their position. When he talks to her at their box, he is shocked when Ellen says to him: "I wonder if Harry [the character in the play] will send yellow roses the next morning."

After this episode, Newland feels the need to hasten his marriage to May, and impulsively follows her to St. Augustine, Florida where she vacationing with her family. May seems to understand more than Newland thinks she does, asking him if his rush had anything to do with another woman (May apparently connects this not to Ellen Olenska, at this point, but a previous indiscretion of "sowing his oats" prior to his engagement with a married woman). Newland reassures her that this is not the case, and continues to think of May, even in her apparent generosity, as only acting out a part taught to her by the restrictive society which made her. Inevitably, Newland and Ellen admit their love for each other in a touching scene in which Ellen admits that her decision not to pursue the divorce was because she was trying to prevent scandal for his sake.

Some time passes, and May and Newland are married. Newland sort of goes on autopilot, fulfilling his duties as husband and member of polite New York society. The couple goes to England after marrying, and there, they meet some acquaintances of the Welland's, Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle. There, Newland also makes the acquaintance of a Frenchman named M. Riviere, whose engagement in what Newland considered to be "real ideas" through the encounter of literature and learned conversation attracts Newland. M. Riviere is poor though, picking up odd jobs as a tutor here and there in order to retain his independence (he once tried to be a journalist, but found the profession to restraining on his intellectual independence). For a time, Newland and Ellen lead separate lives, Ellen engaging in other circles (literary and artistic circles that Newland's old money society doesn't really have contact with) and then subsequently moving to Washington. Newland doesn't see Ellen until he and May's family vacation in Newport: Ellen has been invited as well, and in a strange episode, Newland is sent to fetch Ellen but instead decides to watch her from afar because she hasn't turned around to look at him.

Newland's interest in Ellen has been re-kindled, and he seeks her at a party thrown by the Professor Sillerton and his wife. He hallucinates that a pink parasol, which belong actually to a Miss Blenker, is Ellen's. From Miss Blenker though, he learns that Ellen is actually in Boston. On an impulse, Newland lies to May that he is going to Boston on business in order to see Ellen. In Boston, the two meet, and he learns of a situation in which the Count has promised Ellen money if she were to go back to live with him in Europe. Ellen refuses, desiring her freedom and independence. but the Mingott's and the Welland's expect her to do the "nice" thing, which is to accept. Newland agrees with Ellen (as does M. Riviere, who turns out to be the messenger bearing the message from the count), and so he is subsequently left out of family conversations about Ellen's situation. Though Newland is generally oblivious, the narrative hints more and more that May and her family know more than they let on about Newland. May, for one, seems to keep testing Newland, by dispatching him on errands to fetch Ellen. For example, when the old Catherine Mingott (Ellen's grandmother) has a stroke, May agrees to Newland fetching her Ellen from New Jersey. People speculate that Catherine's stroke has been brought on by Regina Beaufort's plea to Catherine to help her out (since they are related) after Julius Beaufort's recent financial demise. Catherine has requested Ellen's presence to serve as her nurse, ostensibly to help Ellen to avoid the fate of going back to Europe (Catherine too is "unconventional").

For the time being, Ellen is to stay, but Newland doesn't want to consign to their love to such ugly, hackneyed categories as "having an affair" or subject her to "being his mistress." They are at an impasse where they are together but not: Newland says, "I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that--categories like that--won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter." Finally Newland, desperate, asks Ellen to come to him once, but it turns out that May has had a conversation with Ellen, telling her that she was pregnant, so Ellen decided, in the end, to go to Europe (though she made sure to secure an allowance from Catherine so that she did not need to depend on her husband). Newland finds out about this conversation later, and soon begins to realize that many others probably knew about his feelings for Ellen, and have only been pretending to enable everyone to save face. May throws a farewell party for Ellen, and for thirty years, Newland lives his life as a dutiful husband. The very end of the novel, Dallas, Newland and May's eldest son, summons Newland to go on a trip with him, and arranges for him to meet with Ellen. The novel quickly tells about how different this new generation of New Yorkers are from the old--things are more in the open, and Dallas is free to marry his "Ellen Olenska," a bastard child of Julius Beaufort without anyone batting an eye. Newland goes with Dallas to Paris, but at the last minute, watches as his son goes into visit with Ellen, and refrains himself, preferring to keep intact the ideal reality of what has happened in the past.    

CRITICAL APPROACHES/ANALYSIS:
One of the most interesting aspects of Wharton's text is the inaccessibility of "the real" in the text. Though the narration is omniscient, it is primarily focalized through Newland, whose limited perspective disallows access to the "hieroglyphs" of New York society and its characters. Although the omniscient narration ironizes Newland's limited perspective, the reader never gets inside of Ellen or May's heads and can only guess at their interior perspectives (the effect is very Jamesian, in restricting access to the female characters' subjectivities).

Newland repeatedly hopes for a "real" that is beyond the customs and unwritten rules of old, monied New York society. It isn't clear, though, that there IS in fact a "real." At times, he posits that this real is available in Europe, where those who read literature, who write, who engage with "ideas" aren't a separate culture from those who have money. At other times, Newland thinks that running away with Ellen Olenska to somewhere else (Japan, he suggests at one point) is the "real." In the end, as seductive Newland's "real" is, his decision to remain outside while his son visits Ellen signals his own recognition of the tenuousness of his "real." Newland imagines Ellen living her life amidst "theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images, and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners..." This vision of European life he knows isn't necessarily more "real" than America, as he quickly concedes that "more than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would ever wholly understand." Because of this impossibility of knowing, Newland resorts to protecting the vision of his and Ellen's past, because that is something that he does know, and so is as "real" as anything could possibly be.            

The novel's conclusions about the new generation of New Yorkers throws doubt, nonetheless, on even this last bit of "reality." Focalizing Newland, the narrator gives: "To the boy [Newland's son Dallas], no doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more?" Not only are the perspectives of America and Europe different, but so are the perspectives of the past and the present. Dallas's generation seems to have done away with the repressed Victorianism of Newland's, and yet Newland still wonders if maybe there were something more precious to his experience with Ellen because of the repression. It might be said, finally, that every age is an "age of innocence," in that Wharton doesn't allow access to anything definitely "real." Though definitely a biting commentary on the petty social customs of old New York life, Wharton's offer of a limited perspective leaves open the possibility that there is much more behind the curtain of these social customs. At the very least, the rather vindictive contest which May wages with Ellen and wins does happen, though not with directly vindictive words but with hidden but very real implications. The rest we, like Newland Archer, can really only guess at.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

Edition: Molloy

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Beckett's Molloy was originally written in French and published in 1951. For Beckett, writing in French first was a way of distancing himself from the works of English contemporaries like Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. The English version did not come out until 1955, after the success of the world premiere of "Waiting for Godot" in 1953 (and even then, it was an English version in a French publication). The English version was written with the assistance of Patrick Bowles. and it was finally published in England in 1966. Molloy is the first of what became known as "The Beckett Trilogy" which also includes Malone Dies and The Unnamable.

SUMMARY:
Part I:
Molloy is divided into two parts. The first begins with a frame narrative - the narrator, Molloy, is being compelled by someone to write (it is unclear who, and for what purpose). At the end of the first paragraph, Molloy says: "Here's my beginning." This first paragraph is followed by a long paragraph which continues through the rest of the first part. Molloy's account of "what happens" isn't organized as narrative; in a way, Molloy is Beckett's portrait of what would happen if someone who didn't tell stories were compelled to tell one. He begins not even with the pseudo-quest of going to see his mother but with some observations of two people, A and C. From there, he tells of the pleasures of being on his bicycle, which he says he will not call a bike. It is after these accounts that he reveals a fraught relationship with his mother; he doesn't calls her mother but Mag, and she calls him Dan. When he loiters around on his bicycle Mollloy is arrested by a policeman. Molloy, who knows no names or geography, thwarts the officials' efforts to compile a report: "To apply the letter of the law to a creature like me is not an easy matter." At the station, he also encounters a social worker, who foists bad food on him which he resents having to fall into the social worker's narrative which would entail him expressing that he was grateful. He says that he learns some "points of detail" as far as such things go, but not "the essence of the system," in other words, he might learn some aspects of narrative to make his work seem like a narrative, but it isn't, as a whole. He tells of seeing a shepherd and his dog. His pseudo-quest is finally revealed, but no reason is given. On his bicycle, Molloy runs over a dog that its owner was going to have euthanized, and he is captured by the owner, a woman, who wants to engage Molloy to bury her dog. Molloy is unsure if her name is Sophie or Mrs. Loy or Lousse--she might even be a man because she is rather hairy. Since Molloy has a bad leg, he doesn't do much of the work of burying. Lousse contracts him into further obligations by feeding him, and washing his clothes--she reasons that this means he ought to stay with her. He thus stays with Lousse for a while but doesn't know for how long. While at Lousse's, he muses on an older woman named Ruth that he was "in love with" because that's what she told him. They met in a rubbish dump, she paid him for sex, and she died in a tub one day. He eventually leaves Lousse's place on his crutches (his bicycle has been taken away). On his way to his mother's again, he encounters a problem with some stones that he sucks on in his pockets ("sucking stones"): he can't figure out how to suck them evenly since he puts them back in his pocket and can't figure out which one he has sucked last. Molloy becomes obsessed with solving this problem, and he finds an "inelegant solution" which allows him to guarantee some measure of even sucking through the use of his four pockets. He feels some elation at discovering it. Molloy's leg (one is shorter than the other) starts to really bother him, but then the other leg gets stiff from his uneven walking. He encounters with a charcoal burner, whom Molloy says he might have loved, though not in the same way as he had loved Ruth. Molloy hits him with his crutches, though, in a moment of annoyance. At the end of the first part, Molloy finds himself in a forest, applying the logic that if he crawled around in a circle he would actually go straight. When he finally gets out of the forest, he falls into a ditch.

Part II:
Another first person narrator (Moran) begins this part. Moran is some kind of agent, and he accepts a commission from a messenger named Gaber; this is the Molloy Affair. He accepts the mission in part because he is flattered that Youdi, the boss, has supposedly said that "he wants it to be [him]." It is Sunday when the message is delivered, so Moran is forced to skips church. He is a methodical, and principled man, as he calls himself, and so he goes to get communion afterwards. Moran has a son, whom he has orders to take with him. Moran tells him to prepare to leave, giving him strict instructions that he can bring one album of stamps. When his son tries to transfer stamps from another album to the one he was bringing, Moran tells him he can't bring either album. A principled man, Moran wants his son to learn a sense of "sollst entbehren" ("thou shalt abstain," Goethe). Moran tells us that Molloy is somehow already in Moran's head before Gaber mentioned it to him. He's unsure about the ending of the name; this is one of the first clues that the Moran and Molloy character might be one and the same. Moran reasons though that there are five Molloys: the one that "inhabited" him, his "caricature of the same," Gaber's, Youdi's, and the man of flesh. Before the journey, his son gets sick with some kind of stomach complaint. Moran's gruff style of taking care of him involves telling him to take his own temperature (sneaking in a joke about where he ought to put the thermometer), giving his son an enema, and forcing him to eat. They soon begin the journey. Moran doesn't let Martha (the housekeeper) know when they'll be back. Like Molloy, Moran is  "scrivening" because he is "obeying orders," he says. Father and son are then off to "Molloy Country." During this quest, he doesn't remember or didn't get directions from Gaber about what to do with Molloy after finding him. As the quest progresses, Moran becomes more and more like Molloy as his narrative unravels and his "method" gets more and more nonsensical. It is also revealed that Moran has knee problems, much as Molloy had leg problems. Unable to walk, he instructs son to go buy a bicycle from a town called Hole (fourteen miles away), giving him four shillings, ten pence to spend on it. While his son is gone, he meets a foreign-looking man who asks for bread. Moran obliges and asks to look at his walking stick. Another man comes later, who kind of resembles Moran. This man asks if the old man passed by, and annoyed at him, Moran beats him up (and possibly kills him). His son finally returns after being gone for three days. It is clear that he is tired and weak, but Moran makes his son pedal him around on the bicycle. They come at last to "Ballyba," the heart of "Molloy Country" where they see a shepherd and a dog. Ostensibly because he can't take it anymore, Moran's son abandons him, and Moran is kind of touched that his son leaves him 15 shillings. Moran's health declines, his legs are further crippled, and finally Gaber arrives but doesn't really help Moran. Moran asks for a message from Youdi, who said that "life is a thing of beauty...and a joy for ever." Moran is ordered home so he does his best to head home. He reaches home in the spring, even though he was ordered home by the fall. The second part closes with some of Moran's nonsensical theological questions, which are ordered numerically but don't offer much of a clue as far as content goes. By the end, he really seems like Molloy, and even has crutches.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
In Waiting for Godot, narrative is repeatedly thwarted. Molloy (the character) functions similarly as the play, in that he is a person who is unable to narrate according to acceptable models for living. Moran, who begins as a methodical, principled man, eventually becomes more and more like Molloy, signaling the inevitability of this kind of system-breakdown. Molloy is "passionate about truth," he says, so it seems that the doing away with all of the models or systems by which lives are lived is a way of getting at what is real at bottom. Of his journey, Molloy also asserts: "Yes, my progress reduced me to stopping more and more often, it was the only way to progress, to stop." Progress in the realm of true existence outside of narrative teleology (and any and all signs and systems of life representation) requires one to stop the kinds of progress driven by narrative teleology.

Yet, there is a way, just as in "Godot," in which there seem to be moments of narrative potentiality. In Molloy, these moments (the sucking stones episode, Moran's theological principles) are shown to be shams, however. There isn't anything approaching purpose in any narrative sense in Molloy's logic while figuring out his "inelegant solution" to the sucking stones problem; we feel that there's no point to the logic beyond Molloy's own elation over performing this logic. For Moran, the organization of his theological principles at the end of the book seems more pathological, and while Molloy's sucking stones logic actually does make sense mathematically, Moran's words do not make sense (perhaps because mathematical systems are different from the kinds of systems whereby we organize life narrratives--they seem outside of the human, in some other realm of the real). Thus, it seems that Beckett doesn't reject all systems altogether: mathematical systems that seem to have some deeper connection to ontological reality    (than sign and referent) are okay.

It might seem that Molloy's mode of living, and finally Moran's disintegration into the same state, seems formal in the artistic sense, especially in the context of modernist artists focusing at the level of form to escape narratives of meaning and significance that tend to pour into art objects. But Molloy rejects this too: "I saw it in a way inordinately formal, though I was far from being an aesthete, or an artist." He admits to the "formal" focus he has (when he thwarts the policeman's report, he says that he does focus on "points of detail" but not systems, almost like how a painter might focus on the colors and shapes but not what the picture as a whole might signify) but also goes a step further than the artist, in a way, to escape artistic purpose as well. In other words, Molloy also discards the purpose of focusing on form in order to escape meanings because that is a significant purpose in itself.

Thus, finally, to try to ascribe historical contexts to Beckett seems almost sacrilegious but here goes anyways: after the traumatic experiences of WWII, people's faith in literature as a moral or ethical force severely declined (e.g., the Germans had Beethoven, and yet the Holocaust could happen). Beckett's new kind of literature conveys the notion that literature may be worthless and pointless but nevertheless we keep doing it. (SOURCE: Notes from a lecture, Prof. Michael North).

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Edition: Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Waiting for Godot was originally written in French in 1948, and its first stage production was in Paris in 1953. Beckett himself undertook to translate the play into English, and subsequently the play was produced in London (1955), the United States (1956), and worldwide thereafter.

SUMMARY:
Act 1: The setting is a country road with a tree in the evening. Estragon is trying to take off his boots as Vladimir is talking to him. Estragon is annoyed that Vladimir won't help him; Vladimir takes off his hat and makes as if to shake something out but nothing comes out. When Estragon succeeds finally in getting his boots off, they launch into a conversation about repetance, the Bible, and how strange it is that only one of the four apostles thought that one of the two thieves on the cross with Christ was saved. Around this point in the conversation we learn that the two of them are waiting for Godot. They can't decide, however, whether or not they came to the same spot yesterday to wait for him, nor can they quite decide what day it is.

The men seem to have no small degree of affection for one another, they have pet names for each other, Gogo and Didi. They decide that they should hang themselves while waiting but the plan is aborted after some discussion of who should go first. Vladimir gives Estragon a carrot to chew on. Soon, Pozzo comes on stage with Lucky. Pozzo has Lucky on a rope and whips and chokes him when Lucky does not do as he bids. At first, Estragon mishears and thinks that it is Godot. Vladimir and Estragon are indignant at the way Pozzo treats Lucky. Pozzo eats from a basket that Lucky has brought and casts aside his chicken bones, which Estragon hungrily goes after. Pozzo tells him the bones belong to Lucky and so Estragon should ask Lucky if he wants them or not. Lucky is silent, so Estragon takes the bones.

Vladimir asks why Lucky doesn't put down his bags. Pozzo gives the strange explanation that Lucky doesn't want to because he wants to keep Pozzo around as a master. During Pozzo's explanation, Lucky starts crying and Estragon approaches Lucky to wipe his eyes, but Lucky kicks him. Pozzo thinks me may soon take his departure but asks if he can do anything for the men. Estragon would like some money, but Vladimir is ashamed of Estragon for asking. They agree instead that Lucky will entertain them by doing a dance. After Lucky dances, they decide to have Lucky to "think" and when Vladimir puts a hat on him, Lucky launches into a long stream of consciousness speech which does not stop until the hat is removed. Pozzo and Lucky depart shortly thereafter, and a boy appears as a messenger to let Vladimir and Estragon know that Godot will not be coming that night but will come tomorrow. At the close of the act, the two men decide to leave but somehow they still remain there.

Act 2: At the opening of the act, the conversation between Estragon and Vladimir suggests that Estragon has been beaten up by ten people the night before. Conversation about the motive is deflected though. Estragon seeks comfort in being together with Vladimir, and for a moment they say they are happy together, but then they wonder what comes next. They discuss conversation as a way to keep off the abyss of death. They talk about how they are unsure if they were in this same place yesterday. Vladimir suggests Estragon show him his leg wound from yesterday (when Lucky struck out at him) and Pozzo's language infects Vladimir's as he calls Estragon a pig. To pass the time further, Estragon tries on the boots that are on the stage (he isn't sure if they are his from before). Again, the men seem happy with each other for a moment, Estragon remarking: "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"

Estragon falls asleep, dreams, and is comforted by Vladimir when he wakes up. Vladimir never wants to hear Estragon's dreams though. They find Lucky's hat, and they go through some complicated moves in which they switch and reswitch the hats they have (Lucky's, Vladimir's, and Estragon's). Next, they "play" at Pozzo and Lucky, but as Vladimir pretends he is Lucky, Estragon goes off, suddenly thinking he's being chased. Vladimir proclaims that Godot has come but he's wrong of course. Estragon hides behind the tree, then soon comes out and says he will try not to lose his calm again. They get into an argument about who should speak first when they accidentally speak out at the same time. They shower each other with insults, culminating in Estragon calling Vladimir a "Crritic!" They make up.

Pozzo and Lucky arrive again, but this time Pozzo is blind. Pozzo falls (and can't get up), and Vladimir and Estragon talk about helping him up. Then Vladimir makes a speech about doing something "while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed." Suddenly, it seems that even their "waiting for Godot" seems purposive. Vladimir helps the fallen Pozzo, and Vladimir also falls and can't get up. He asks Estragon for help but Estragon says that he's going. Estragon stretches out his hand finally but also falls. While down, Vladimir and Estragon get annoyed with Pozzo, and Vladimir kicks Pozzo in the crotch. This seems a bit harsh and so after Pozzo crawls away, they call him back, and to pass the time, try some other names on him (specifically, Abel and Cain). Eventualyl, Vladimir and Estragon discover that they can actually get up on their own. They then help Pozzo up, and Pozzo wonders where "his menial" is so Estragon goes to fetch Lucky. Pozzo tells him to kick Lucky, and Estragon does. Pozzo doesn't remember their meeting yesterday, and he and Lucky exit.

Vladimir and Estragon are left unsure whether that was Pozzo or not. Vladimir starts to expect a sort of cycle, and when he sees the boy arrive again, he expects that the message is that Godot won't come but will come the next day. Vladimir tells the boy to tell Godot that he saw him (though this might be impossible since the boy doesn't remember him from before). Estragon is asleep during this exchange. Night falls, and Estragon wonders what would happen if they "dropped" Godot. Vladimir says that he would punish them. Again, they consider hanging themselves, but they have no rope and Estragon's belt is not strong enough. They agree to hang themselves the next day unless Godot comes and saves them. The play closes with Vladimir telling Estragon to pull his pants on, Estragon mishears him saying that he wants his pants off, but then discovers his pants are already off. They decide to go but as before, they do not move.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
As many have noted, Waiting for Godot evades conventions of narrative through the lack of what would traditionally be considered "incident" in stories. There are no cause-effect links, and such questions as why they are waiting for Godot are conspicuously absent. The setting has no historical, cultural, or geographical specificity. It cannot even be said that things happen, since the characters repeatedly express their uncertainty about "yesterday." Waiting for Godot rejects plot, causality, setting, happenings, as well as any sense of the past or the future.

James H. Reid points out that Frederic Jameson's exegesis on postmodernism, though more focused on the historical effects of late stage capitalism, bears many connections to the effects explored in Beckett's Waiting for Godot: 

• Embedded in Godot are major elements of Jameson's postmodernist discourse: negation of linear historical time and action and imprisonment within an ahistorical, saturated, and commodified discursive space. But whereas Jameson calls this spatialization a real historical totality and attributes it to a necessary ruse of  capitalist history, Godot attributes it to a purely discursive strategy that its characters construct and deconstruct" ("Allegorizing Jameson's Postmodernist Space," Romantic Review).

In other words, in Waiting for Godot the characters, through what they say (and what they don't say), create the conditions of ahistoricality which Jameson says that late capitalism produces.    

I am not sure whether or not Waiting for Godot is a kind of allegory for the postmodern condition; it seems that any such critical position on Godot is resisted by Estragon's strident denunciation of "crritics!" I guess I'll just end with something I felt about the text as I was reading: the withholding of narrative conventions didn't just seem to "annoy" me but rather I think it made the moments where narrative potentiality surfaces to be more poignant in a tragic sort of way (maybe this is where the "tragicomedy" comes in). The audience desires the "relief" of narrative, or perhaps even to give narrative to these deeply unhappy characters who keep returning to wanting to hang themselves. But of course, just as Godot, narrative just never actually comes. One such moment of narrative potentiality is at the very end, when Estragon asks what will happen if they "drop" Godot. Vladimir provides this "cause" with an "effect"--that Godot will punish them. They then decide that they will hang themselves unless Godot saves them, setting up a conditional cause-effect chain. The audience has been trained though, by the rest of the play, that Godot won't come, and that here it seems that Vladimir and Estragon, in talking about punishing and saving have confused Godot with God. The moment feels tragic, I think, because of the sudden narrative potentiality amidst a landscape where nothing can happen.

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

Edition: The Lonely Londoners (Longman Caribbean Writer Series)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956, a time when Britain was beginning to close the door to Commonwealth citizens. Prior to the mid-1950s and after WWII, the British government encouraged immigration to help fill in labor gaps created during war; the mass immigrations during this period from Afro-Caribbean areas became known collectively as the "windrush generation." Selvon's text thus registers the disheartening arrival and subsequent experiences of immigrants coming after Britain was closing its doors. Selvon's characters are of working-class background.

The sequel to The Lonely Londoners is Moses Ascending.

SUMMARY:
The novel is narrated in third person, in a West-Indian inflected dialect of English. Though the third person narration enables focalizations of different characters throughout, it most closely follows Moses Aloetta, a rather jaded older man who has lived in London longer than any of the others. At the start of the novel, Moses goes to meet "a fellar named Henry Oliver" at Waterloo station who has just arrived from Trinidad. At the same time, Moses's friend Tolroy is at the station meeting his family who have just arrived from Jamaica (it turns out that more of them have arrived than he has bargained for). Tanty, Tolroy's mother, is an outspoken woman who from the moment of arriving, gets her way in having a reporter take a picture of her whole family when he had planned to just take one of her.

Upon his arrival, Henry Oliver seems overly confident about his prospects, and Moses thinks he is naive.  Moses gives him the epithet "Sir Galahad" and offers him a place to stay for the night. Moses offers to help him find work, but Galahad, wanting to give off the impression that "everything all right," decides to go find work for himself. Once he sets off to the employment exchange, Galahad begins to feel out of place and confused: "Everybody doing something or going somewhere, is only he who walking stupid." He doesn't get far before he runs into Moses again and so Moses ends up going with him to the exchange, where Galahad obtains an unemployment card.

The next section of the novel introduces Cap, a Nigerian who came to London to study law but who ended up instead spending money on cigarettes and women. Cap manages to get along in London on his charm, at times getting into trouble and needing Moses to bail him out. Cap is dating an Austrian girl, who tells him he should try harder to get a job. Cap pretends that he gets a job at night, but instead he "went off to hustle woman as usual" and lies to her. At another point, he steals a watch from an English girl to finance a relationship with a German girl. He also ends up marrying a French girl, and borrowing money from his friend Daniel in order to take her out until fortuitously, she gets a job at a store. Sometimes, Cap gets himself into comical situations. In a particularly humorous episode, once Cap and Moses went out on Bayswater Road between the Arch and the Gate, and Cap accidentally takes home a "woman" who was actually a man. In short, Cap gets in all sorts of trouble, but "still Moses have compassion on him."

The following section tells about another character, Bart, in a similarly episodic manner. Bart, lighter skinned than the others, seems to have an easier time assimilating. He jealously guards his own money, and rarely lends it out. Bart gets into a relationship with a white girl and he is invited to meet her parents. Before Bart can tell the lie that he is Latin-American, the girl's father kicks him out because he "don't want no curly-hair children."

Meanwhile, in Tolroy's family, Lewis (Tolroy's sister's husband) finds work alongside Moses at a factory and imagines that his wife, Agnes, is unfaithful to him while he is away. When he returns home every night, he beat her and so eventually she left him. Tanty, shunned by her family for her naivete about London, actually scores some successes of her own: at a local store, she manages to get her way, insisting on paying on credit, and then later even setting up a system for other visitors to the store to do so as well. In another successful episode, Tanty rides the tube to retrieve a key from Agnes at her work.

Galahad is getting on better than might have been expected, and Moses looks on knowingly as Galahad revels in the dropping the names of landmarks in London (like "Charing Cross") to signal a sort of ownership over the city. Galahad manages to get a night job, and even take a white girl, Daisy, on a date to a movie and dinner. Afterwards, he has her over and though she's a bit prejudiced against his way of making tea and his West Indian English, Galahad tells Moses that the date has gone swimmingly.

Big City, also from Trinidad, likes to cuss a lot and to tell people that he is no small town fellow (hence his nickname). Big City has trouble with English forms after he gets into a car accident involving himself and a bus and needs help from Moses to "full" them up.

After this particular episodic character sketch, the narration switches into a lengthy passage in stream of consciousness without punctuation. This passage gives impressions of London nightlife in the summer, and tells of various adventures the men have (usually with women), including one in which Moses takes a girl home and is terrified of what the police will do to him when she seems to be getting sick under his watch. The narration's blurring and accelerated effects might be encapsulated in these final lines: "and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about."

The narrative then snaps back into character sketches, introducing a character from Barbados called "Five Past Twelve" because he is blacker than midnight itself. In this section, Harris who likes to think he is in the know as far as English customs go, throws a party at St. Pancras. At the party, Harris is embarrassed by his fellow immigrants, afraid that they will "make rab and turn the dance into a brawl." Tolroy brings his whole family including Tanty, and once again, Tanty is her outspoken self when she puts Harris in his place about his shame.

In a particularly bad season for work, Galahad's hunger reduces him to catching a pigeon in the park to roast. A white woman is horrified, and insensitively calls him a monster and calls the police. Moses and Galahad talk about their difficult lives in London, yet oddly once they've been there for a while, they don't want to go back to their home countries. They wonder if it has to do in part with the mistaken notion of London as a place of opportunity. In a "p.s. episode," Cap also catches seagulls from his windowsill for food.

The final scene is slightly more uplifting; the boys go to Moses's place every Sunday as if it were a kind of church, showing that in their talking over girls, the difficulty of getting work, and feelings of alienation, there is a kind of valuable community that coheres. The novel closes with Moses looking out upon the Thames and sensing a kind of sublimity while thinking about the vastness of London life: "it had a greatness and a vastness in the way he was feeling tonight, like it was something solid after feeling everything else give way." He even imagines whether he might ever write a book.  

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS: (A previous essay I wrote on print culture in The Lonely Londoners and its sequel, Moses Ascending)

As noted by James Procter in Dwelling Places, the characters in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners use the discursive power of naming (and re-naming) places in London to derive a sense of belonging. For characters like Galahad who are new to London, to be an Englishman in London is a matter of recognizing and using a number of sign systems in relation to categories such as “music and song, film, literature, conversation.”[1] In this essay I wish to highlight the importance of one particular sign system in Selvon’s fiction, namely, the sign system of newspapers and print-journalism. With Benedict Anderson’s idea of print-culture’s power in the facilitation of imagined communities in mind, I suggest that Moses Aloetta’s eventual displacement within the house that he owns in Moses Ascending is paralleled by his resistance to newspapers and print-journalism and consequent resistance to imagined communities that are made available to him.

London’s vastness as a metropolis necessitates an imagined community; in The Lonely Londoners, West Indians with memories of tight-knit communities in their home nations are acutely aware of this necessity. To the new, West Indian Londoner, the metropolis “divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”[2] Selvon’s boys recognize that newspapers allow strangers in the metropolis to form links with one another by way of a shared readership.

For the most part, Selvon’s characters in Lonely Londoners believe in the power of shared-readership as a means for gaining at least partial acceptance into the larger community. Big City tells his friends that he attended a party with “bigshots” that one would read about in the Evening Standard, thereby legitimating the very imagined community that would never print his name.[3] Though Big City is aware of his own exclusion, he suggests that his involvement with a print-worthy event signifies at least partial belonging. The narrator’s description of how Harris, meticulous about significations of Englishness, dresses, with “bowler hat and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm with The Times fold up in the pocket so the name would show” demonstrates newcomer complicity in legitimizing the power of print-culture’s signage in representing the dominant, white, literate, imagined community.

In Moses Ascending, however, Selvon’s boys become more critical of the white monopoly over print-culture and the imagined community which it produces. Galahad, more confident now in his place in the metropolis, has joined the Black Power movement, whose members aspire to produce their own newspaper to counter the “untruths” borne from the traditionally accepted, white newspapers. “You know these English papers does only have contorted views of the scene. If we get our own, we can tell people the truth.”[4] What Galahad does not realize is that in supporting the new paper, he is merely complying in the creation of another imagined community, whose print-narrative may be as “contorted” as that of the white newspapers.

Moses demonstrates that he is critical of both representation white-London print and Black Power print. Of newspapers written by whites, Moses remarks, “The first crocus in the spring is seen by a black man, and he harks to the cuckoo long before all them other people what write to newspapers to say they was the first.”[5] On the other hand, Moses wants nothing to do with Brenda’s Black Power newspaper either, preferring that his white man-servant appear on the front page instead of himself. Galahad tells Moses that in writing a memoir, he must report on “what’s happening” socially and politically, but Moses resists because he wants to write something “personal and intimate” which does not cling to the imagined communities of social and political happenings, the stuff of print-culture.[6] To be sure, Moses is ambivalent—he proudly boasts about reading the Times, News of the World, and the Observer while his white man-servant reads comics and he also gives Galahad’s suggestion a try by taking his reporter’s pad to the Paki’s sheep slaughter and the Black Power rally. However, his ambivalence renders him unable to whole-heartedly embrace either the imagined community of white-London or that of Black Power.

Unfortunately, because he resists both imagined communities that are available to him, Moses ends up without a comfortable place in his own house. Brenda’s success in creating a new imagined community in opposition to the one of white-London by printing a newspaper for Black Power is followed upon by her ascension to a more desirable place in the house. Bob, who has gained acceptance into this newly minted imagined community by getting his picture onto the front page of the first issue, has also ascended in the house. Moses, who resists accepting the imagined communities made available (or partially available) to him, is “displaced” into the basement of his own home.

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[1] James Procter, “Dwelling Places,” in Dwelling Places, Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 52.

[2] Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1985), 74.

[3] Ibid., 101.

[4] Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1984), 13.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Ibid., 42.