Word: morgans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anne Tyler has filled her splendid new novel Morgan's Passing with this same hostility to analysis. Morgan Gower, her protagonist, defies analysis or explanation. He acts with a breathtaking lack of reason, and his thoughts and feelings spin in a jumble of delusion, nostalgia, and impulsiveness. He still perplexes his wife Bonnie after 20 years. He confuses and embarrasses his daughters by wearing funny hats and keeping a pet goat in his Victorian mansion. Even Morgan doesn't understand himself. He revels in the total absurdity of everything he does...
...Morgan's eccentricities would be excusable, or at least understandable, if reason ever skipped alongside insanity. If he deplored his marriage, his wife might comprehend why he disappears from home for days on end. If he hated his job, it might be clear why he often masquerades as someone else--a doctor, a short-order cook, a puppet collector. But Morgan has no reasons. Even when he leaves his wife for his lover Emily, he doesn't do so because he loves Emily more or because he is tired of Bonnie. The spirit moves him, and he leaves...
...explanation for Morgan's character is that no explanation exists. There are no cause-and-effect relationships in Morgan's personality. To Tyler, what makes Morgan run is an unfathomable extra something in all human beings that makes us people instead of machines. He has the individuality common to all of us that defies psychoanalysis and makes all humans hopelessly erratic...
...Morgan is an Everyman, are we all simply less outrageous versions of that peculiar persona? Tyler makes it clear that she believes...
Very subtly Tyler turns Morgan into a universal character. She shows remarkable skill at placing eternal truths in the mouths of her character without overstepping the line between truth and triteness...