Word: likeness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Fowles' technique is to take a ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel-with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom...
Less Conclusive Conclusions. Like all parody, his is ultimately a critique of the conventions he is parodying. In one disarming aside to the reader, Fowles argues that the Victorian novelist, aided by his assumed omniscience, patted life into artificial patterns and robbed characters of reality. While the Victorians believed that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy traditional...
...Like Diogenes, Stephen Becker has spent most of his career as a novelist searching for an honest man-or at least a protagonist who can face a tough moral decision with honesty. In A Covenant with Death, a youthful judge must decide the fate of a man who kills his executioner after being convicted of a murder that he did not commit. Juice concerns a wealthy businessman fighting the machinery mobilized to exonerate him of the drunken-driving death of a pedestrian. Now, in his sixth novel, Becker, 42, turns back to the Civil War. In an excellent period morality...
...Martin Dickson of Cincinnati, writing after the boy's death: "But why revive these harrowing incidents of the war? As well ask, why tell the story of the war at all? If it is to be told, let us have the whole. Let the young not be misled." Like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Becker's book explores the whole of war with realism and irony. Becker's hero, astounded at man's inhumanity, rages superbly against the dying of the light...
...Left and revisionist historians have argued in recent years that, in fact, Acheson and Truman fired the opening shots of the cold war, that such a policy as the Truman Doctrine was the equivalent of bombarding Fort Sumter. Acheson is aware of the argument, and like the careful lawyer he is, presents a formidable brief for the defense. Soviet troops had occupied the northern provinces of Iran; to force them out strong American pressure was needed. The Truman Doctrine, which combined military and economic aid, was developed only to counter Soviet designs upon the faltering regimes of Greece and Turkey...