Word: sunlight
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...depth of The Sunlight Dialogues alone merits Gardner's ranking among the top novelists of this century. It is not merely a recitation of unrealistic '60s ideology, but an inquiry into the causes of that ideology and why it didn't and couldn't work. And, after all, a decade as chaotic and confused as the 1960s demands a man on a motorcycle as its chonicler...
...FASCINATION of the interaction between these two characters is that, for all his faith in law and order, Clumly slowly begins to realize the ways in which the society he defends is full of injustice. Through his conversations with The Sunlight Man, it dawns on Clumly that his function as a police officer is merely to preserve the appearance of order in a society rife with crime. As the outlaw magician tells him: "I care about every single case. You care about nothing but the average. I love justice. You love...
...Gardner is not so naive that he holds up the chaotic protest of The Sunlight Man as an ideal to be striven for. It is clear by the end of The Sunlight Dialogues that it is the Clumlys of the world who have real impact, while Sunlight Men tend to burn out from their own fiery natures. We see this in the scene in which one of Clumly's officers finally apprehends The Sunlight...
...came to Figlow that it was a joke. The Sunlight Man had no intention of shooting him. He had come to give up, broken by grief, but in the madness of his trickster vanity or maybe just human vanity he could not resist one final laugh at the childish cruelty of man, one last indifferent or partly indifferent sneer, or maybe one final ridiculous pretense that he was still indifferent, still had dignity. By the time the joke came clear, it was too late. Figlow had shot him through the heart...
...this paradox that gives The Sunlight Dialogues its depth. Whereas law and order are fundamentally unjust, but able to survive, protest and chaos are incapable of enduring. Although The Sunlight Dialogues is set in the 1960s and uses the lingo of that decade, Gardner's book is far closer to the nightmare pessimism of Kafka's The Trial or Canetti's Auto-Da-Fe than to the hippie philosophizing of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...