Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rabb is an intelligent and imaginative director. But no matter what values he feels may have changed in Streetcar, I'm afraid the protagonist of the play has not. This is not Stanley's play nor ever will be, and to try and make it so by removing every trace of grace and nobility from Blanche, leaving her as little more than a drunken whore, is hardly fair to Mr. Williams. Once this is done, the play is no longer Blanche's tragedy, nor does it become Stanley's triumph, but rather an extended sort of fertility rite. "Procreative power...
What will most grasp the reader's attention, however, is the no-holds-barred sex which enlivens the mid-summer campaign for the governorship of Mississippi. In this connection it is useful that the protagonist, although paunchy and past his prime, is possibly the biggest man with the girls south of Memphis. Also that the two fully developed female characters are nymphomaniacs allows for frequent relaxations from the business of capturing the statehouse. The only problem with all this is that it imposes the necessity of building up to greater and greater exploits and more improbable melodrama. With the first...
...Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth...
...Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant) has produced a pleasant little fiction involving gadgeted and gusseted cars that are driven by a privileged group of dogs. The dogs themselves, of course, are at the mercy of the whims of the designers, i.e., the breeders. Author Wallop's protagonist is Hobbs, an English bulldog-one of the more fantastic dog designs. Hobbs owns 250 shares of General Motors common deeded to him by a Miss Galloway, "a maiden lady of honored memory and considerable wealth." Hobbs has a manservant and subscribes to the Wall Street Journal. It seems...
...book.) The collection of pygmies in the Soviet Writers Union, besides their fatuous forays against Zhivago's politics complained that the character lacked a social conscience, that the book itself was devoid of a social meaning. And, in a way, it is legitimate criticism. When a protagonist of great stature fails to come to terms with reality, it is seldom a social novel; but it is often great tragedy, and such is Pasternak's book...