Word: pilgrimate
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Rebirth with Newby is no hallelujah experience. It means confronting and finally answering the question that one's particular destiny has been asking from the beginning. At the end, Townrow lives out the dream that has haunted him from the opening page. Like a saintly pilgrim, he sets off across Port Said harbor in a small boat, ferrying the coffin of the dead man whose estate he came to plunder, and then moves out to sea in search of an absolute emptiness in which to find himself...
Everyman Figure. The task is beyond him. Eventually he presents his publisher with the jumbled chronicle of another American prisoner who also survived the raid, as well as some of the horrors of peace and prosperity. Too archly named Billy Pilgrim, the second survivor is hardly a real character-"there are almost no characters in this book," Vonnegut says, "because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." But he does very well as something between a consumer-age Candide and a Vonnegut Everyman figure...
...prejudice for objective appraisal." The latter type has three awful exemplars in Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, who recently collaborated on a book called Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. As the selections begin with Beowulf, and include such dispensable works as Hamlet, Pilgrim's Progress, the poetry of Hopkins and Eliot, it is clear that the three iconoclasts are prepared to do without a great deal that Burgess is not. The essay in which Burgess puts a few of the 50 treasures back in their places, and the three "naughty, smackable" cutups back...
...predecessor, The Trial. Possibly the fault lies with the master himself; his aphoristic sweep seems cinematically untranslatable. As a novel, The Castle has inspired sheaves of interpretations. In one theory, the Castle is seen as religion inhabited by the unseeable God. The land surveyor, then, is on a pilgrim's progression to salvation. More fashionable exegeses view the Castle as untenanted. Heaven is barren and the village is the earth below. In the most perverse-and most Kafkaesque-analysis, the fable is turned. The villagers have only his word that the land-surveyor is what he is: he produces...
...dissenters are John and Charles Wesley (March 3), the 18th century founders of Methodism, George Fox (Jan. 13), the 17th century founder of the Society of Friends, and John Bunyan (Aug. 31), the Puritan author of The Pilgrim's Progress. All of them had their problems with the Church of England. John Wesley, himself an ordained Anglican priest, broke with the church when it refused to recognize his movement, and ordained his own ministers. Quaker Fox and his flock were hounded by church authorities for much of their lives. Bunyan spent twelve years in prison for preaching without...