Word: bafflement
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Everything ends badly. William loses all his money, and Poodle, who has walked out on him, comes clinging back. The reader is left with the information that a fool is a fool and a feeling of bafflement about why a skillful author has chosen to pull the wings off this particular literary...
...Death to Bear. It is as if. against all his impulses, Armah will not show pity-will not permit life to be more than the choice, as he puts it, of "what kind of death we can bear." With bafflement, almost with rage, he confronts "the man" he himself has created and asks: Was there not something "unnatural in any man who imagined he could escape the inevitable decay of life and not accept the decline into final disintegration...
Imagine also Grosjean's bafflement when he found, from carbon-14 tests and other data that the menhirs belong to the period 1400 B.C. to 1200 B.C.- at least seven centuries before the golden age of Greece or the Etruscans. Earlier neolithic sculpture is totemic in nature, but Corsican menhirs, Grosjean noted, are "realistic and naturalistic, not stylized like Egyptian statues, and not divinities." To account for them, Grosjean has had to reconstruct an obscure artistic period. His starting point was a mysterious Mediterranean "People of the Sea," who left dome-shaped temples on Corsica, Sardinia and elsewhere...
...Derek Goldby's direction cannot keep segments of the drama from dialogyness. There is nothing logy about Brian Murray and John Wood in the taxing title roles. Every shifting breeze of the play's moods crosses their faces: they can summon up anxiety, false courage, utter bafflement, and honest fear with a flick of the lip, or a twist of the torso. They give the play's mind a body, and make R. and G. an evening for the playgoer who seeks not to forget but to know himself...
Brian Keith's performance as the colonel Miss Taylor plays around with, is Reflections' strongest, perhaps because he plays the only obstensibly normal person in the film. Keith's bafflement after the death of his wife, his expressions of confused regret at the loss of a woman whom he betrayed every day and who was repelled by him, is honest and touching. Keith's character is a satisfying medium between the shrill simpleness of Miss Taylor and the obvious complexity of Brando, and he attracts most of the audience sympathy...