Word: jonahs
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...author's reporting of the color and confusion of this Celtic barcarolle is vivid and poetically evocative, but it is interrupted by personal references that seem self-indulgent. Her sister is flying to Peking, the author mentions several times without explanation. There is a playwright named Jonah, a son, a marriage, all mentioned with verbal nudges and eyebrow lifting, none comprehensible to the reader or relevant to Killorglin. There are friends in Ireland whose portraits are washed in far too thinly for a book that at times appears to be a memoir in the act of becoming a novel...
Whale-Fodder: When the will to prominence is traumatically frustrated, or when pleasing fantasies of rank are shaken by unwitting confrontations with reality, the Jacob-Joseph complexes may become aggravated, most typically in the freshmen or senior year, into the more severe Jonah complex. Here the undergraduate feels himself engulfed in helplessness. He sleeps through breakfast, but goes to dinner early so he may watch T.V. afterwards in his house common room. Directionless, he rarely studies, but thinks about studying perpetually. If he is a senior, he lacks a thesis topic. Jonah arrived in his predicament through running away...
...charges of proselytizing, Warshaw developed a reading course, drawn from the King James Version, that stresses literary influence rather than theological interpretation. His students soon found a new dimension in Moby Dick's Ishmael or Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, learned the origin of a doubting Thomas, a Jonah or a Judas, and got the point of Handel's Messiah or Harry Belafonte's rocking Noah. On new tests, Warshaw's pupils pushed their grades to high levels, and a couple of students named Cohen and O'Connell got perfect scores. Parents were grateful; Warshaw...
Though he does not think himself a prophet, Graham can sound like Jonah addressing the men of Ninevah: "We're approaching a crisis that will make Cuba look pale, and you only have to read the papers to see it. The explosive points around the world are increasing rapidly; it seems as if the whole world is catching fire...
...with a journalist's feel for day-to-day events. However, in using this approach, modern critics have not ignored the austere tradition of prophet and moralist, one "crying in the wilderness." Of course, our better critics, the ones we can take seriously, are more sophisticated than a Jonah or Isaiah. Yet, as the old prophets did, men like Riesman worry a lot about what meaning human events might carry; they ask general questions about what life might mean to the individual and to the society in which he lives...