SHORT
QUESTIONS
PG IV
Comment on the characterisation
of Bentley Drummle in Great Expectations.
Bentley Drummle is one of Pip's acquaintances in the book
'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens. Of all the characters in Great
Expectations Bentley Drummle is
one of the easiest to hate. He is a spoiled rich kid who treats the people
around him with very little respect. He was raised in a wealthy family where
his bad habits were encouraged. In fact, Pip introduces Bentley by telling us
that he was ''idle, proud, niggardly, reserved, and suspicious.'' Niggardly
means stingy, and later on in the book we see that he is happy to borrow money,
but refuses to lend it. Bentley Drummle is not only rude, but he is also a
''blockhead'', explains Pip. Right from the beginning, we know that Bentley is
not going to be a popular guy.
Bentley Drummle is Pip's lifelong nemesis. He's mean,
haughty, and abrasive. Drummle is a fellow student at Matthew Pocket’s whom Pip
first meets in Chapter 23 not long after his arrival in London. Mrs Pocket is
distracted by Drummle’s being ‘the next heir but one to a
baronetcy’ and Drummle’s aristocratic background allows him to
behave rudely to people around him. He shows himself to be surly, bad-tempered
and unsociable. He is arrogant and a bully, with Pip saying he has a ‘blockhead
confidence in his money and in his family greatness’. Drummle is a
rival for Estella’s affections and he finally persuades her to marry him. After
treating Estella very badly – he is said to have ‘used her with great
cruelty’ - he dies in a riding accident involving a horse he has
beaten.
Comment on the significance of Kurtz's final
words in Heart of Darkness.
Heart
of Darkness is
the magnificent novel by Joseph Conrad in which he unfolds the story of
Marlow’s search for Kurtz, the company agent whose unlawful soul has gone to
the extreme in his exploitation of the heart of darkness and his dealing with
the natives of Belgian, Congo. This Kurtz has become the victim and executioner
of his actions.
Kurtz
comes to Africa with a moral ambition. But he surrenders to the primitive
darkness, becomes the slave of his greed. He lacks the restraint in the
gratification of his lust. But in the end, he realizes that his life has been
built in the wrong way. In the dying moment, the last words of Kurtz, “The
horror! The horror!” reveals his realization. Kurtz is judging his performance
through these words. It is the realization of Kurtz what he has done in Africa
is horror. Kurtz’s last words also reveal the eternal nature of man, the tragic
shortcomings of the heart of darkness.
What
the white people do in Congo is totally horror. Their behavior becomes worse
than the cannibalism of Blackman. They become hollow men, empty of humanity and
unnaturally savage. Marlow’s aunt, like the anonymous narrator, has an
idealistic view of colonialism and is pleased with herself for helping to send
Marlow to Africa as one of the workers and as an emissary of light. She
subscribes entirely to the view that the motive behind colonialism is to
civilize the conquered people. Although Marlow’s mission is limited to rescue
of Kurtz, there is a sense in which his trip to Congo is a recreation of the
colonialist expedition, which enables him to understand its nature. Already on his
way out to Africa, he notices that the only settlements seen from the coast are
trading places with names out of some “sordid fare” which he thinks there is a
torch of insanity about the man of war firing into the continent. Even at this
early stage, the colonial expedition strikes as a “merry dance of death and
trade” or as a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares. Not until he
comes to the “grove of death,” however, does he realize the full extent of the
destructive process in which the whites are engaged in Africa.
Before
Marlow actually meets him, Kurtz seems to be a very different type of
colonialist since even his detractors acknowledge that he is an idealist and he
has come out equipped with moral ideas. “He is a universal genius” yet he turns
into a ruthless exploiter in spite of his romantic idealism and his desire to
bring the light of white civilization to Africa. His many gifts as a musician,
a painter, a journalist, and a politician make him truly representative of a
highly sophisticated culture. But he becomes a slave of darkness, a new Doctor
Faustus who sells himself to the power of materialism. He even prepares to kill
the harlequin, who served his life once for a little ivory.
It
is only when Marlow sees the shrunken heads on poles that his farmer image of
Kurtz suddenly collapses. He is appalled to discover human heads on the fence
surrounding Kurtz’s station, to hear that he took part in “unspeakable rites.”
Thus white civilization has been tested in Kurtz and found wanting.
But even then Kurtz is not common. He is a remarkable person who is involved in a spiritual struggle – of the confrontation with the unconscious. The complete knowledge that he achieves by looking into himself makes him totally destructive because he finds his heart totally empty and barren. And Marlow says, “Kurtz hides in the magnificent fall of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart.”
Marlow
understands Kurtz’s spiritual struggle, his voyage of self-discovery. So, when
he witnesses Kurtz’s confrontation with death and hears him exclaim “The
horror! The horror!” he realizes what Kurtz tries to say. Therefore he is right
in interpreting this exclamation as a judgment upon the adventures of his soul
on earth. He also rightly asserts that “it had candor, it had conviction…it had
the appealing face of a glimpsed truth.” Thus when he steps over the threshold
of invisible, Kurtz, at last, achieves awareness of what he is.
The
last words reveal the glimpse of eternal truth about the nature of man. Kurtz,
starting out like Marlow as an “emissary of night,” cannot conquer the
potential for the evil within himself. His final message, “The horror! The
horror!” ironically becomes a judgment and warning about the universal weakness
of man.
Write
a brief note on the role of Lord Fellamar in Tom Jones.
Lord
Fellamar is an aristocrat (duh: lord) and a member of the British
army. He is also an oddly contradictory character: on the one hand, as an army
man and as a nobleman, he is very serious about honor and the maintenance of
his good name. When Squire Western responds to his proposal for Sophia's hand
in marriage by saying, "You are a son of a b— […] for all your laced
coat" (15.5.26), Lord Fellamar storms off and, later, through his
captain-assistant-person, almost challenges Squire Western to a duel. Clearly,
Lord Fellamar is used to a certain kind of social code, within which he feels
secure and able to behave properly.
But on the
other hand, Lord Fellamar is also embarrassingly easy to influence. When he
confesses his sudden passion for Sophia (whom he meets in a crowded theater
when a fight breaks out in the audience), he quickly agrees to Lady Bellaston's
terrible plan that he should rape Sophia first and then marry her.
He
believes Lady Bellaston when she says that Sophia is hopelessly in love with a
useless rascal named Tom Jones, and that forcing her into marriage would
actually be rescuing her from the dark fate of seduction by
Tom. Lord Fellamar decides to go ahead with this vicious and deeply dishonorable
plan, even though he feels deep inside that it probably isn't the right thing
to do.
Luckily,
Squire Western interrupts Lord Fellamar before he actually succeeds in
assaulting Sophia. But his feelings for her don't go away. And Lady Bellaston
continues to play on them, encouraging Lord Fellamar to send a gang of guys
after Tom to kidnap him and put him on a naval ship. Again, Lord Flamer's
scheme doesn't succeed, but the gang does get Tom thrown in jail after his duel
with Mr. Fitzpatrick.
Why does Lord Fellamar follow Lady
Bellaston's advice so thoughtlessly when his own instincts warn him that he is
not doing the honorable thing? For one thing, Lord Fellamar trusts Lady
Bellaston's opinion about how to seduce women because she is also a woman. But
while Lady Bellaston may be a woman, she is also a bad woman—obviously,
her advice is biased and untrustworthy.
Lord
Fellamar kind of redeems himself by the end of the book. When he realizes that
Tom is actually a gentleman and not a scoundrel, he immediately gives up all
hope of marrying Sophia. He also gets a friend to help him testify in court
that Mr. Fitzpatrick is not dead, so Tom cannot have
murdered him. By getting Tom out of jail, it appears as though Lord Fellamar
has made up for his earlier lousy behavior: he has resolved to "do
everything in his power to make satisfaction to a gentleman [Tom] whom he had
so grossly injured" (18.11.6).
While we
appreciate Lord Flamer's efforts to make things better for Tom, we still have
major issues with the guy. The problem is that he has no real moral instincts.
He does his best to behave according to a code of honor, but he is also willing
to set aside that code if that will get him what he wants. Like Lady Bellaston
and all the other members of London high society whom we meet in this book,
Lord Fellamar seems to care more about appearing decent than
actually being decent. We can't exactly trust a guy like
that.
Examine
the first encounter between Pip and Magwitch, the convict.
Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with the narrator, Pip, who
introduces himself and describes an image of himself as a boy, standing alone
and crying in a churchyard near some marshes. Young Pip is staring at the
gravestones of his parents, who died soon after his birth. This tiny, shivering
bundle of a boy is suddenly terrified by the voice of large, bedraggled man who
threatens to cut Pip's throat if he doesn't stop crying. The man, dressed
in a prison uniform with a great iron shackle around his leg. The criminal
demands food which Pip says he will get. After they part, the young Pip keeps
looking back at the man as he walks alone into the marshes. The image of the
man holding his arms around him, alone on the horizon save a pole associated
with the death of criminals, is strikingly familiar to the initial image of
young Pip, holding himself in the cold, alone in the churchyard with the stones
of his dead parents. For a moment, then, the relationship seems to warm. They
share a common loneliness and a common marginalization from society, the orphan
and the escaped convict. Even while he is afraid, Pip instinctively displays a
sympathetic reaction.......................................................
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