Word: evil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Olympic sexual athletes, and partners in mental disease. In its particulars, Sophie's Choice evokes Styron's own experience as a young writer struggling with hisfirst novel; in its overall scheme, it is Stingo's Bildungsroman, the story of a young man travelling north and discovering the nature of evil...
...guide on this metaphysical journey is Sophie, a veteran of Auschwitz and therefore a firsthand expert on evil. Sophie relates the grotesqueries of the "Final solution," the ovens and boxcars and the unspeakably pervasive smell of burning Jews. And she personifies the onerous guilt that the survivors were left with...
There is nothing wrong in general with the nebbish-as-protagonist, as Joyce amply demonstrated in The Dubliners. But when the author relies on us to see the staggering evil of the holocaust through his eyes, he needs to give the protagonist some kind of stature; Stingo crumbles under the weight of the apocalypse...
...might go further and say, as Roger Rosenblatt has suggested, that the book is hollow because Styron doesn't understand evil. Certainly, Styron wanted to write a book about evil; the ambition is palpable in the novel's heft. But I suspect it was an intellectual desire, not a visceral one, that it did not spring from a central concern in Styron's life. What kind of evil, after all, do you find on Martha's Vineyard? There are long sections of secondary history, and extensive quotations from people like Hannah Arendt, passages that seem tacked-on, contrived. The characters...
...whether Harvard's skill or Columbia's ineptitude was responsible for the outcome. But as J.S. Mill so aptly put it: "We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." It was a little of both...