Word: walliser
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Some time before he made this unusual choice, British Colonel John Wallis had shoved a .45 into his mouth and blown his brains out. As a barrister on the British commission investigating war crimes, he had helped hang German General von Kenelm; Wallis' overwhelming sense of guilt had pulled...
In The Vintage, Author West explores two worlds: 1) an imagined purgatory which borrows nothing from such Godfearing models as Dante's Inferno but has much in common with the Godless statism of George Orwell's 1084; 2) the real British middle-class world of John Wallis seen...
What becomes more important than either world is West's exploration of Wallis' guilt-stabbed consciousness and the whole problem of man's.moral responsibility for his conduct. Ironically, Wallis' assigned partner through purgatory is General von Kenelm, his legal victim. He too reveals his past: that...
Wallis' life turns out to have been not so much a web of calculated evil as of thoughtlessness and stupidity. He was always at odds with his conventional father, almost from the first had too much money. In purgatory, what seems to bother him most is his haphazard sex...
Pleasant Devil. When the devil, in the guise of a pleasant-mannered guide named Ransome, offers him "freedom from guilt, freedom from sin," Wallis refuses. He has come to realize that only by remembering "every little petty lie, every deceit, every shame, from the first to the last," can he...