Word: inners
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...room for love, purpose, and human heroism despite being set in a post-apocalyptic world. “The Road” centers on a father and son who try to survive while traveling through a ravaged American landscape that has been destroyed by some unspecified disaster. Both the inner and outer lives of the father and son are essential to the novel’s message. The external scenes where the pair hide from a band of roaming cannibals or chase a thief who stole a shopping cart holding their only food are filled with a basic human vitality...
...only read the first section of Roth’s novel, I was immediately overwhelmed by its heavy fog of exhausted and demoralized irony. “American Pastoral” is replete with characters who lack consequential or connected outer lives, and who also lead hollow and phlegmatic inner lives. These characters are trapped in listless, “nether lives,” in which neither their exterior jobs nor their interior fantasies and dreams inspire them...
...enter into a fantasy about itself and about the world.” Zuckerman explains, “Our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes.” Essentially, the community nourishes their impoverished inner lives with the successful outer life of the Swede...
...dinner conversation dramatizes Roth’s self-destructive tension between the inner and outer life, which paralyzes the novel. Ironically, Zuckerman himself lacks a self-sufficient inner life and must search for the nonexistent inner life of the Swede to justify his own mental existence. While the Swede hopes to resolve the troubles of his inner life with the accomplishments of the outer life, the remaining characters are cut off from meaningful action...
...those places, the crime problem isn't solved; the fight is scarcely begun. To the many factors that have combined to cool the nation's violent fever, more must be added - more creativity, more pragmatism, more honest concern for the victims of inner-city crime. It's a daunting prospect. The will to keep working on the most persistent pockets of lawlessness will be severely tested in this era of unbalanced budgets. You might be tempted to say it's hopeless. But that's what people were saying 20 years ago, just before progress broke through...