A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J. D. Salinger

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 and was later republished as the opening story in the collection Nine Stories(1953). In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger introduces the Glass family, who would become recurring characters in his fiction. In the next ten years, Salinger published three other Glass family stories in the New Yorker: “Franny,” “Zooey,” and “Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters.” These stories appear in Salinger’s other books, which include Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Critics revered Nine Stories, but Salinger’s other works were not so well received. The siblings of the Glass family were criticized for being unkind and obnoxious.

Salinger’s first novel, Catcher in the Rye (1951), was the critical and popular success that launched Salinger into both literary fame and social scandal. Catcher quickly became an American classic, and its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, became the voice of a generation that was coming of age in the postwar era. After the popular success and controversy of Catcherand the criticism of his subsequent works, Salinger isolated himself from the world, publishing little and maintaining a private life.

Salinger wrote “Bananafish” in postwar America, when many veterans of World War II were struggling with the readjustment to civilian life. The story includes many of the elements that Salinger revisits throughout his career, including the idea of the outsider, male angst, critique of New York society, contempt for materialism, and the redemptive nature of children. Seymour Glass, like many of Salinger’s other protagonists, is an unhappy outsider, critiquing the society of which he is part. Salinger’s heroes are most like him in this regard—outsiders who are dissatisfied with society and therefore remove themselves from it by either self-seclusion (like Salinger himself) or suicide.

Muriel Glass waits in her Florida hotel room for the operator to put her call through to her mother. The hotel is full for a sales convention, so she must wait a long time. She fixes her clothing, paints her nails, and reads a magazine. When the call does go through, Muriel reassures her anxious mother about her safety. Her mother is concerned about the erratic, reckless behavior of Seymour, Muriel’s husband. She hints at a car accident that Seymour and Muriel were involved in and suggests that Seymour deliberately crashed Muriel’s father’s car into a tree. She reminds Muriel of the strange and rude things Seymour has said to members of Muriel’s family. Seymour has recently returned from the war, and Muriel’s mother believes that he was discharged from the military hospital prematurely. Muriel is not as concerned as her mother. She is preoccupied by the fashion at the resort and the evening’s events. In the evenings, there are formal dinners and cocktail parties, at which Seymour often sits apart, playing the piano. The resort is full of society people, although Muriel feels that the quality of these people has diminished since the war. She tells her mother that Seymour is on the beach by himself.

Throughout “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” characters struggle to communicate with one another, and each attempt is fraught with difficulty. Muriel and her mother engage in a haphazard conversation in which Muriel never really hears her mother’s worries and Muriel’s mother never really hears Muriel’s reassurances that she is fine. The two women talk at rather than with each other, and neither woman succeeds in truly communicating her thoughts to the other. When Muriel attempts to talk with the psychiatrist at the resort, their communication is hindered by the noise around them. Seymour is entirely unable to communicate with other people at the resort, preferring to sit alone playing the piano or spend time at the beach rather than try to enter into a society in which he feels like an outsider. Sybil’s mother fails to communicate with Sybil clearly, believing that Sybil says “see more glass” when she is actually talking about Seymour Glass. Only Sybil and Seymour seem able to communicate effectively, although their discourse is on a child’s, not an adult’s, level.

Though Muriel and Seymour do not speak with each other in the story, their communication is so fraught as to be nonexistent. Muriel has no idea what is really going on in Seymour’s mind, and Seymour seemingly has no desire to explain to her how he feels. The most tragic lack of communication is Muriel’s mistaken certainty that Seymour’s mental health is fine. Seymour’s violent suicide is, perhaps, the one truly successful act of adult communication in the story, the one gesture that cannot be misread or ignored.

The idea of seeing permeates “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Seymour’s name sounds like “see more,” a confusion that Sybil’s mother falls prey to when Sybil talks to her about “see more glass.” Sybil’s name also references seeing; in Greek mythology, a sibyl was a seer. Seymour, or “see more,” suggests that Seymour is literally able to see more than other people. Because of his traumatic experiences in the war, he has a greater understanding of life and can recognize the materialism and superficiality of the world around him. Like Seymour, Sybil can see what others cannot, though her openness is a function of her childishness rather than of trauma and regret. She easily sees the imaginary banana fish that Seymour tells her about and is therefore able to “see” Seymour in a way the adults in his life cannot.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Employing a shifting, improvisational style directly based on Ellison’s experience of jazz performance, Invisible Man ranges in tone from realism to extreme surrealism, from tragedy to vicious satire to near-slapstick comedy. Rich in symbolism and metaphor, virtuosic in its use of multiple styles and tones, and steeped in the black experience in America and the human struggle for individuality, the novel spent sixteen weeks on the best-seller list and won the National Book Award in 1953. Achieving one of the most sensational debuts of any novel in American history, Invisible Man was hailed by writers such as Saul Bellow and critics such as Irving Howe as a landmark publication; some critics claimed that it was the most important American novel to appear after World War II.

Invisible Man was heavily influenced by the work of a number of twentieth-century French writers known as the existentialists. Existentialism, whose foremost proponents included Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, explored the question of individuality and the nature of meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. Ellison adapted the existentialists’ universal themes to the black experience of oppression and prejudice in America. He also engaged powerfully with the tradition of African-American social debate. In the character of Dr. Bledsoe, the novel offers a vehement rejection of the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, which advocated that blacks should work toward economic success as a means of achieving racial equality. It also critiques, through the character of Ras the Exhorter, Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of black nationalism.

Despite—or possibly because of—the overwhelming success of Invisible Man, Ellison never published another novel in his lifetime. Though he published two books of essays—Shadow Act in the 1960s and Going to the Territory in the 1980s—Ellison spent his later decades laboring on a vast novel, which he never finished. Upon his death in 1994, Ellison left behind more than 2,000 pages of unedited, incomplete manuscript. In heavily abridged and edited form, this manuscript was published five years after his death under the title Juneteenth, to generally unfavorable reviews.

THE NARRATOR BEGINS telling his story with the claim that he is an “invisible man.” His invisibility, he says, is not a physical condition—he is not literally invisible—but is rather the result of the refusal of others to see him. He says that because of his invisibility, he has been hiding from the world, living underground and stealing electricity from the Monopolated Light & Power Company. He burns 1,369 light bulbs simultaneously and listens to Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” on a phonograph. He says that he has gone underground in order to write the story of his life and invisibility.

As the narrator of Invisible Man struggles to arrive at a conception of his own identity, he finds his efforts complicated by the fact that he is a black man living in a racist American society. Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing through a series of communities, from the Liberty Paints plant to the Brotherhood, with each microcosm endorsing a different idea of how blacks should behave in society. As the narrator attempts to define himself through the values and expectations imposed on him, he finds that, in each case, the prescribed role limits his complexity as an individual and forces him to play an inauthentic part.

Upon arriving in New York, the narrator enters the world of the Liberty Paints plant, which achieves financial success by subverting blackness in the service of a brighter white. There, the narrator finds himself involved in a process in which white depends heavily on black—both in terms of the mixing of the paint tones and in terms of the racial makeup of the workforce. Yet the factory denies this dependence in the final presentation of its product, and the narrator, as a black man, ends up stifled. Later, when the narrator joins the Brotherhood, he believes that he can fight for racial equality by working within the ideology of the organization, but he then finds that the Brotherhood seeks to use him as a token black man in its abstract project.

Ultimately, the narrator realizes that the racial prejudice of others causes them to see him only as they want to see him, and their limitations of vision in turn place limitations on his ability to act. He concludes that he is invisible, in the sense that the world is filled with blind people who cannot or will not see his real nature. Correspondingly, he remains unable to act according to his own personality and becomes literally unable to be himself. Although the narrator initially embraces his invisibility in an attempt to throw off the limiting nature of stereotype, in the end he finds this tactic too passive. He determines to emerge from his underground “hibernation,” to make his own contributions to society as a complex individual. He will attempt to exert his power on the world outside of society’s system of prescribed roles. By making proactive contributions to society, he will force others to acknowledge him, to acknowledge the existence of beliefs and behaviors outside of their prejudiced expectations.

Over the course of the novel, the narrator realizes that the complexity of his inner self is limited not only by people’s racism but also by their more general ideologies. He finds that the ideologies advanced by institutions prove too simplistic and one-dimensional to serve something as complex and multidimensional as human identity. The novel contains many examples of ideology, from the tamer, ingratiating ideology of Booker T. Washington subscribed to at the narrator’s college to the more violent, separatist ideology voiced by Ras the Exhorter. But the text makes its point most strongly in its discussion of the Brotherhood. Among the Brotherhood, the narrator is taught an ideology that promises to save “the people,” though, in reality, it consistently limits and betrays the freedom of the individual. The novel implies that life is too rich, too various, and too unpredictable to be bound up neatly in an ideology; like jazz, of which the narrator is particularly fond, life reaches the heights of its beauty during moments of improvisation and surprise.

The narrator is not the only African American in the book to have felt the limitations of racist stereotyping. While he tries to escape the grip of prejudice on an individual level, he encounters other blacks who attempt to prescribe a defense strategy for all African Americans. Each presents a theory of the supposed right way to be black in America and tries to outline how blacks should act in accordance with this theory. The espousers of these theories believe that anyone who acts contrary to their prescriptions effectively betrays the race. Ultimately, however, the narrator finds that such prescriptions only counter stereotype with stereotype and replace one limiting role with another.

Early in the novel, the narrator’s grandfather explains his belief that in order to undermine and mock racism, blacks should exaggerate their servility to whites. The narrator’s college, represented by Dr. Bledsoe, thinks that blacks can best achieve success by working industriously and adopting the manners and speech of whites. Ras the Exhorter thinks that blacks should rise up and take their freedom by destroying whites. Although all of these conceptions arise from within the black community itself, the novel implies that they ultimately prove as dangerous as white people’s racist stereotypes. By seeking to define their identity within a race in too limited a way, black figures such as Bledsoe and Ras aim to empower themselves but ultimately undermine themselves. Instead of exploring their own identities, as the narrator struggles to do throughout the book, Bledsoe and Ras consign themselves and their people to formulaic roles. These men consider treacherous anyone who attempts to act outside their formulae of blackness. But as blacks who seek to restrict and choreograph the behavior of the black American community as a whole, it is men like these who most profoundly betray their people.

Probably the most important motif in Invisible Man is that of blindness, which recurs throughout the novel and generally represents how people willfully avoid seeing and confronting the truth. The narrator repeatedly notes that people’s inability to see what they wish not to see—their inability to see that which their prejudice doesn’t allow them to see—has forced him into a life of effective invisibility. But prejudice against others is not the only kind of blindness in the book. Many figures also refuse to acknowledge truths about themselves or their communities, and this refusal emerges consistently in the imagery of blindness. Thus, the boys who fight in the “battle royal” wear blindfolds, symbolizing their powerlessness to recognize their exploitation at the hands of the white men. The Founder’s statue at the college has empty eyes, signifying his ideology’s stubborn neglect of racist realities. Blindness also afflicts Reverend Homer A. Barbee, who romanticizes the Founder, and Brother Jack, who is revealed to lack an eye—a lack that he has dissimulated by wearing a glass eye. The narrator himself experiences moments of blindness, such as in Chapter 16 when he addresses the black community under enormous, blinding lights. In each case, failure of sight corresponds to a lack of insight.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

“And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think . . . the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough.”

Mel makes this comment roughly halfway through the story, after he has told everyone that he’ll explain to them what love really is.

Carver is known for his minimalist approach to prose, and for this reason he’s often compared to Ernest Hemingway and Anton Chekhov. His short stories focus on middle-class, often blue-collar people who are struggling with hard truths, disappointments, inertia, and small glimmers of hope in their ordinary lives. Along with writers such as Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Carver is considered a writer of the “dirty-realism” school. Carver’s short stories are also recognizable for their abrupt endings, sometimes called “zero endings,” which do not seem to tie up the story neatly, if at all. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is one of Carver’s most famous stories and often regarded as the epitome of the dirty-realism school.

Carver and his wife divorced in 1982, and Carver married his longtime girlfriend, writer Tess Gallagher, in 1988. They were married for only a few months before Carver died from lung cancer at age fifty. After his death, his editor, Gordon Lish, claimed that he edited Carver’s work so heavily that he should be considered a coauthor of the stories. Carver’s widow, Gallagher, similarly claimed ownership of Carver’s stories and said Carver had borrowed story ideas from her own work. Such accusations, however, have not tarnished Carver’s legacy, and he remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

The nature of love remains elusive throughout “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” despite the characters’ best efforts to define it. Mel tries again and again to pinpoint the meaning of love, but his examples never build up to any coherent conclusion. For example, he tells his friends about an elderly couple who nearly died in a car crash, but the conclusion of the story—the old man depressed by not being able to see his wife—merely confuses everyone. When he asserts that he’ll tell everyone exactly what love is, he instead digresses into a muddled meditation about how strange it is that he and the others have loved more than one person. His attempts to clarify the nature of love eventually devolve into a bitter tirade against his ex-wife. He seems much more certain about what love is notand tells Terri several times that if abusive love is true love, then she “can have it.”

Laura and Nick believe that they know what love is, but they never really provide a clear definition or explain why they’re so certain in their convictions. They merely demonstrate their love for each other by blushing and holding hands, but these actions simply support the mystery of love rather than unmask it. Terri, of all the friends, seems to be most certain about the meaning of love and repeatedly claims that her abusive ex-boyfriend, Ed, truly loved her, despite his crazy way of showing it. The examples she provides of this love—beating, stalking, and threatening—are disturbing but serve as proof in her mind. Like the others, however, she cannot translate her certainty into any kind of clear explanation of the nature of love.

Although the four friends talk for a while about love, the fact that they never manage to define it suggests that language can’t adequately describe emotional, abstract subjects. Mel does the most talking, but his bloated stories and rambling digressions show that he has trouble conveying his thoughts and feelings, despite how much he talks. Terri speaks a great deal about her former lover Ed, but when Mel challenges her, she turns to intuition to prove her point. She believes that Ed loved her no matter what Mel or the others think, demonstrating that gut feelings about love can be more powerful and accurate than words. Laura and Nick, meanwhile, say very little about the nature of love and instead rely on physical gestures to clarify what language cannot: they hold hands, blush, and touch each other’s legs. Carver indicates that words simply aren’t enough when talking about love, which is probably why all four friends have fallen silent by the end of the story.

The sun in the story, which is bright at the beginning and gone by the end, represents the loss of clarity and happiness as the friends grow increasingly confused about the meaning of love. At the beginning of the story, Nick notes that the kitchen is bright and compares the friends to giddy children who have “agreed on something forbidden.” The talk is light and hopeful, just a friendly conversation on a gin-soaked afternoon. However, as the conversation about love becomes increasingly dark and complex, the sun in the kitchen slips slowly away. Nick notes that the sun is “changing, getting thinner,” and, not long after, that the sun is “draining out of the room.” As the sun disappears completely, the conversation devolves into Mel’s drunken threats against his ex-wife, including a fantasy of murdering her. At the end of the story, the friends are sitting in complete darkness.

The sun has gone, as have their rosy, hopeful perceptions of love...

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolano's "By Night in Chile" is considered one of the great contemporary classics from South America. It is the story of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who, on his deathbed, confesses to his collusion and association with the brutal Pinochet dictatorship which was responsible for the killings of thousands of people.

The novel is unique in that it is composed of one long paragraph. Bolano often uses page-long sentences to describe in detail the literary and cultural world of twentieth- century Chile as seen through the eyes of a Chilean literary elite. Urrutia makes a Faustian bargain for his own soul, giving up his calling of morality for a career as a one of Chile's literati. He meets and becomes friends with Chile's literary greats, including Pablo Neruda. But this patronage comes with a price.

Urrutia is a character that both willfully ignores the political turmoil of his country, insisting instead on a return to art as a cure for the country's ills, and eventually becomes tutor and accomplice to Pinochet himself, teaching him a course in Marxism so that Pinochet will know more about his enemies. Urrutia both learns the art of literary criticism as well as the art of ignoring injustice for political and personal gain. He learns of the beauty of art and nature while at the same time preserving the church and state with tactics of violence and oppression.

The climax of the novel comes when Urrutia learns that one of his literary friends, Maria Canales, was secretly hiding a torture chamber in her basement used to torture and execute critics of the Pinochet government. Canales held parties in her house for the literary elites of Chile while in the basement acts of horror and violence were being carried out.

Bolano's novel is both a satire of art and literature as well as a bitingly sharp critique of the church and critical culture of Chile during the last half of the twentieth century. Bolano is able to humanize Urrutia even while implicating him in the horrors that the country underwent during the political turmoil and violence of the Pinochet regime.

Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni

Life is Beautiful opens on a note of hilarity as the protagonist, Guido, and his best friend, Ferruccio, rocket down a country slope, the brakes on their rickety old car having given way. They pass through a parade, and the audience is immediately aware of where we are: the bystanders, believing Guido to be a Fascist leader, all raise their arms in the "Heil Hitler" sign. While Ferruccio attempts to fix the car, Guido happens upon a little farm, where the woman who is to become the love of his life literally falls from the sky into his arms. "Good morning, princess!" he cries, grinning widely.

Guido and Ferruccio find lodgings with Guido's uncle, Eliseo, who recently has come under attack by Fascists. Eliseo also helps Guido to get a job as a waiter in a fancy hotel. Guido visits a moneylender in an effort to secure a loan to open up a bookshop, and he soon realizes that the disagreeable man, Amico, who refuses his loan is also the betrothed of the woman who fell into his arms, Dora. The following series of events demonstrates what a truly extraordinary character Guido is: he is uniquely capable of manipulating his surroundings so that events that are "coincidences" take on the aura of genuine magic. It is this ability that ultimately sways Dora: on one rainy night, Guido virtually steals her away from the insipid Amico and takes her on a journey through her imagination to a place where pillows can be used as skirts, the Virgin Mary throws keys from the heavens, and red carpets unroll through darkened piazzas.

At Dora's engagement party to Amico, she decides once and for all to run away with the mysterious man who keeps appearing out of nowhere. Guido rides Uncle Eliseo's horse (which has been painted green and graffitied with the words "Jewish horse") into the ballroom and spirits her away to the home where they are to leave for several joyful years. They have a son, Giosue, who has his father's enthusiasm for life and his mother's tendency to hiccup.

A far darker event occurs: Guido begins to be harrassed by the Fascists. Soon he, Eliseo, and Giosue are taken away on a train to a concentration camp. Dora, refusing to be left behind, insists that she be allowed to go to the camp as well.

At the camp, Guido decides that he will create an elaborate ruse to protect his son from the horror of their situation. He tells Giosue that his own father took him on a "trip" just like this one when he was a boy, and that if he stays silent, does not cry or ask for his mother, and obeys all the rules, he will win points. After he wins 1,000 points, he will get first prize: a real tank. Giosue, excited at the idea, approaches the camp as a game rather than what it truly is: a prison.

The three adults go in very different directions once at the camp. Eliseo, since he is an old man, is taken to the showers. Dora goes to the women's camp, where she hears stories about the children being slaughtered and fears for the safety of her husband and son. Guido and Giosue go to the barracks, where Guido continues to imbue the darkness of the camp with an air of levity and joy. He even commandeers the loudspeaker so that he and Giosue can cry out to Dora that they miss her and love her.

Guido's hope for escape arrives when he is asked to be a waiter at an event where Doctor Lessing, an old friend of his from the restaurant back home, now a doctor in the Nazi army, will be dining. Doctor Lessing, however, ignores the gravity of Guido's situation; it seems that he only wanted Guido to wait tables at the party because he needed help solving a riddle. Desolate, Guido takes Giosue back to the barracks, but not before stopping to play the Offenbach opera that he and Dora once attended over the loudspeaker in an effort to lift his wife's spirits.

Soon the war is over, and the camp is thrown into a state of confusion and panic. All of the prisoners are being loaded onto trucks that are returning empty. Desperate to warn Dora, Guido tells Giosue to hide in a cabinet until everyone has gone, dons women's clothing, and sneaks over to the women's camp. He is discovered, but as he is marched off to his death, he manages to give his son one last moment of joy: as he walks by the cabinet where Giosue is hiding, he throws his son a wink and does a funny little walk--playing the game to the bitter end.

When morning arrives Giosue, seeing that everyone has gone, tentatively crawls out of the cabinet. He looks around in confusion and then hears a rumbling in the distance. His eyes light up: a real tank is rounding the corner! He has won! An American soldier pulls him up into the tank, and they ride out of the camp. As they pass the crowds of escaped prisoners, Giosue recognizes his mother and runs to her. She wraps him in a tight embrace. "We won!" he cries out. "Yes, we won," Dora says.

After World War I, Italy was in a state of turmoil. Political groups such as communists and anarchists were vying for attention and sway, and King Victor Emmanuel III was losing control over his country. Angry, bitter soldiers had returned to a broken country. Without the direction they were accustomed to in the military, they were aimless. Benito Mussolini gave these soldiers direction. He organized them into the "Blackshirts," groups of armed peacekeepers ready to do his bidding. In this way, Mussolini cultivated martial strength and eventually overthrew the weak government of Italy in 1922. The Fascist party ruled Italy until its fall in 1943.

Under Mussolini's rule, anti-Semitism in Italy experienced a dramatic increase. On July 14, 1938, the Ministry of Popular Culture issued a manifesto della razza, or "manifesto of the race." This manifesto declared that there is a hierarchy of races and that the Jewish race is inferior to the Aryan race. In the wake of this publication, many Jews experienced persecution, lost their homes and jobs, and eventually were shipped to concentration camps. There was little outcry after the manifesto della razza or the resulting treatment of the Jews. This is not surprising, however, because Italy's history of persecuting Jews extends back before Mussolini and the Fascist party (as long ago as the early 1800s, Italian Jews were being placed in ghettos; recall also Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice). Thus, the lack of national indignation at these new anti-Semitic laws is understandable. The people, though uncomfortable at the harshness of these laws, were not uncomfortable enough to do anything to stop them from being implemented.

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany joined hands as the Axis Powers in World War II. They not only joined forces on the battlefield, but they also worked together to send Jews (as well as other "problematic" citizens) to concentration camps. Many prisoners died from malnutrition, disease, exhaustion, or execution. These camps were scattered throughout Germany and Poland, with some in Italy and elsewhere. A program of euthanasia called "The Final Solution" was created during the final years of the war. This program called for the annihilation of all "undesirables." Extermination camps were set up in Poland for the purpose of killing off Jews, gypsies, and whomever else the state had a political or personal animosity towards. The extermination camps, including Auschwitz and Treblinka, killed millions. Men and women were shipped from Poland, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere to these camps. A Jew living in Italy during this time was likely to be shipped to a concentration camp or even an extermination camp. The survival rate was very low, though some survivors of these horrific camps are still alive today.

Life is Beautiful seeks to convey, for one thing, the reality of life during this period, especially life in a camp for one family in particular. But it simultaneously injects a new spirit into a story that has been told many times. This story of some of the horrors of the Holocaust includes a unique, almost lighthearted element, something beyond the material reality that on its face is so horrible. Benigni's willingness to use comedy to underscore the evils of fascism is undoubtedly shocking, but it is extremely effective in conveying Benigni's firm belief that beauty and light can be found even in the most horrible of places.

From many theme that were used in this movie, I wanna share two of them; Innocence and Bravery:

Innocence

Guido is decidedly naive, or at least, he presents himself that way. When Ferruccio describes the Schopenhauer Method to him, he takes it very seriously and very literally, failing to understand that it is a state of mind and not a magic trick. This naivete is a form of innocence that often makes him seem incapable of understanding cruelty or evil in others. When his uncle Eliseo shows him that his horse has been painted wih the words "Jewish horse," he takes it as an annoying prank rather than an omen of violence and hostility. Guido's naivete belies his faith in the good of humanity.

Giosue has the innocence of a child, and Guido fights to preserve this innocence. The game he concocts for Giosue shields him from the uglier parts of human nature. In addition to protecting his son's life, Guido protects his son's innocence. In Life is Beautiful, innocence is an outlook, not something pure that can be tainted. Though the film spans several years, Guido never learns to drive, choosing to ride a bike instead. Guido understands the misdeeds that are being done to him by the fascist leaders of the concentration camp, but he prefers to maintain a positive outlook. Giosue is exposed to the same misdeeds, but Guido imposes his positive (albeit deliberately constructed) attitude on his son. Guido chooses to cherish innocence in himself and others because he loves humanity and refuses to become jaded by man's failings.

Bravery

Bravery is an ubiquitous theme throughout Life is Beautiful. The pressures of anti-Semitism, cruelty, and prejudice affect everyone in the film, and each character's reaction to these pressures is highly indicative of his or her personal beliefs and proclivities.

Dora is a paragon of bravery, and her dilemmas in the film mirror the dilemmas faced by countless inhabitants of Italy in the 1930s. At the beginning of the film, she finds herself trapped in a relationship with a man she does not love, surrounded by socialites who do not think or act like she does. She hates her surroundings but feels helpless to escape. When Guido comes along, however, she realizes that there is another option: following her heart. She bravely leaves the safety of her surroundings to be with her true love, and she becomes far happier for having done so. Dora's sense of being swept up by the inertia of her surroundings recalls how many Italians felt when the Fascists came to power. Dora does not like what is happening in her life, but she sees no viable alternative. Likewise, many Italians felt that opposing the government was impossibly difficult and dangerous. On the one hand, their silence amounted to consent; on the other hand, their silence could be interpreted as cowardice and a lack of bravery. When Guido sweeps in on a horse and rescues Dora, he shows that such bravery is possible and highly desirable; his act serves as an allegory for (and an endorsement of) opposition to the government.

A disaster such as the Holocaust is much more complicated than a natural disaster such as a hurricane. Natural disasters test an individual's bravery but are initiated in ways that normally are wholly external to humanity. The Holocaust, in contrast, was the direct result of individual choices and decisions (and most likely not the result of an impersonal Schopenhauer-like "will").

Whereas a natural disaster can be seen as a battle between society and nature, disasters such as the Holocaust pit society against itself. During the Holocaust, each person had to analyze the situation and decide whether or not to embrace society's new values. Bravery was tested along with personal allegiances and personal values. The conflicts that arose in the wake of these complex choices tested bravery even further. For example, a Nazi official with a Jewish uncle would have had to weigh his allegiance to his state against his allegiance to his family, and the question of how to be "brave" would not have a simple answer. An Italian-Jewish farmer who owned land in Italy would have had to decide whether to flee the country or keep the land that had been in his family for ages, weighing his love for his home against his instinct for survival. Perhaps "bravery" provides too simple a scale on which to weigh the decisions of those involved in such a complicated matter. Humanity, idealism, individuality, and willpower are pertinent factors, and sometimes "doing the right thing" is not so simple as being brave or courageous in the face of risk. Brave actions depend on a host of intellectual, practical, and theological virtues.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Wilde published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, before he reached the height of his fame. The first edition appeared in the summer of1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. It was criticized as scandalous and immoral. Disappointed with its reception, Wilde revised the novel in 1891, adding a preface and six new chapters. The Preface (as Wilde calls it) anticipates some of the criticism that might be leveled at the novel and answers critics who charge The Picture of Dorian Gray with being an immoral tale.

It also succinctly sets forth the tenets of Wilde’s philosophy of art. Devoted to a school of thought and a mode of sensibility known as aestheticism, Wilde believed that art possesses an intrinsic value—that it is beautiful and therefore has worth, and thus needs serve no other purpose, be it moral or political. This attitude was revolutionary in Victorian England, where popular belief held that art was not only a function of morality but also a means of enforcing it. In the Preface, Wilde also cautioned readers against finding meanings “beneath the surface” of art. Part gothic novel, part comedy of manners, part treatise on the relationship between art and morality, The Picture of Dorian Gray continues to present its readers with a puzzle to sort out. There is as likely to be as much disagreement over its meaning now as there was among its Victorian audience, but, as Wilde notes near the end of the Preface, “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.”

In 1891, the same year that the second edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published, Wilde began a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, an aspiring but rather untalented poet. The affair caused a good deal of scandal, and Douglas’s father, the marquess of Queensberry, eventually criticized it publicly. When Wilde sued the marquess for libel, he himself was convicted under English sodomy laws for acts of “gross indecency.” In 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor, during which time he wrote a long, heartbreaking letter to Lord Alfred titledDe Profundis (Latin for “Out of the Depths”). After his release, Wilde left England and divided his time between France and Italy, living in poverty. He never published under his own name again, but, in 1898, he did publish under a pseudonym The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a lengthy poem about a prisoner’s feelings toward another prisoner about to be executed. Wilde died in Paris on November 30, 1900, having converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed.

When The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, it was decried as immoral. In revising the text the following year, Wilde included a preface, which serves as a useful explanation of his philosophy of art. The purpose of art, according to this series of epigrams, is to have no purpose. In order to understand this claim fully, one needs to consider the moral climate of Wilde’s time and the Victorian sensibility regarding art and morality.

The Victorians believed that art could be used as a tool for social education and moral enlightenment, as illustrated in works by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing. The aestheticism movement, of which Wilde was a major proponent, sought to free art from this responsibility. The aestheticists were motivated as much by a contempt for bourgeois morality—a sensibility embodied in Dorian Gray by Lord Henry, whose every word seems designed to shock the ethical certainties of the burgeoning middle class—as they were by the belief that art need not possess any other purpose than being beautiful.

If this philosophy informed Wilde’s life, we must then consider whether his only novel bears it out. The two works of art that dominate the novel—Basil’s painting and the mysterious yellow book that Lord Henry gives Dorian—are presented in the vein more of Victorian sensibilities than of aesthetic ones. That is, both the portrait and the French novel serve a purpose: the first acts as a type of mysterious mirror that shows Dorian the physical dissipation his own body has been spared, while the second acts as something of a road map, leading the young man farther along the path toward infamy. While we know nothing of the circumstances of the yellow book’s composition, Basil’s state of mind while painting Dorian’s portrait is clear. Later in the novel, he advocates that all art be “unconscious, ideal, and remote.” His portrait of Dorian, however, is anything but.

Thus, Basil’s initial refusal to exhibit the work results from his belief that it betrays his idolization of his subject. Of course, one might consider that these breaches of aesthetic philosophy mold The Picture of Dorian Gray into something of a cautionary tale: these are the prices that must be paid for insisting that art reveals the artist or a moral lesson. But this warning is, in itself, a moral lesson, which perhaps betrays the impossibility of Wilde’s project. If, as Dorian observes late in the novel, the imagination orders the chaos of life and invests it with meaning, then art, as the fruit of the imagination, cannot help but mean something. Wilde may have succeeded in freeing his art from the confines of Victorian morality, but he has replaced it with a doctrine that is, in its own way, just as restrictive.

Interestingly, Dorian’s trajectory from figure of innocence to figure of degradation can be charted by Wilde’s use of the color white. White usually connotes innocence and blankness, as it does when Dorian is first introduced. It is, in fact, “the white purity” of Dorian’s boyhood that Lord Henry finds so captivating. Basil invokes whiteness when he learns that Dorian has sacrificed his innocence, and, as the artist stares in horror at the ruined portrait, he quotes a biblical verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow.” But the days of Dorian’s innocence are over. It is a quality he now eschews, and, tellingly, when he orders flowers, he demands “as few white ones as possible.” When the color appears again, in the form of James Vane’s face—“like a white handkerchief”—peering in through a window, it has been transformed from the color of innocence to the color of death. It is this threatening pall that makes Dorian long, at the novel’s end, for his “rose-white boyhood,” but the hope is in vain, and he proves unable to wash away the stains of his sins.

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

The Comedy of Errors is generally assumed to be one of Shakespeare's early plays, (perhaps even his very first) and its emphasis on slapstick over verbal humor (in contrast with later comedies) has led many critics to term it an "apprentice comedy." The exact date of composition is unknown: It was first performed on December 28, 1594, at the Gray's Inn Christmas Revels, to an audience that would have been largely composed of lawyers and law students. Attempts have been made to date it by references to historical events mentioned in the text (notably in Act III Scene ii, when Dromio describes the fearsome Nell/Luce with references to European politics and geography), but the references are so vague that any exact dating amounts to guesswork.

As with many of his plays, Shakespeare drew on classical sources for the plot of The Comedy of Errors. The bare bones of the story are drawn from the Roman comedy Menaechmi, written by the ancient dramatist Plautus (c.254- 184 B.C.); Shakespeare might have read the play either in the original Latin or in an English translation that was published in 1594 but may have circulated in manuscript form before that year. In any case, the English playwright made a number of changes to the original story, including the addition of a second set of identical twins (the Dromios), the expansion of Adriana's character and the creation of her sister, Luciana, and, finally, the creation of the back-story involving Egeon and Emilia. The play also draws on a number of other sources-- the lock-out scene, where Antipholus of Ephesus is locked out of his home for dinner, resembles a scene in another Plautine work, Amphitruo, in which a master is kept out of his own house while the God Jupiter impersonates him. The general tone of Comedy is drawn from Italian comedy of the period, the shrewish wife is a characteristic figure in English comedy, and a number of the ideas about marriage are drawn from early humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam. The play has always been very popular with audiences, if somewhat less so with critics, and in this century, the plot was borrowed by Rodgers and Hart for their musical, The Boys from Syracuse.

The Comedy of Errors is light, frothy entertainment, driven by coincidence and slapstick humor, its events confined within a single day. There are hints of Shakespeare's later forays into deeper character development, especially in the early laments of Antipholus of Syracuse for his missing twin, but the story remains largely on the surface. Characters are mistaken for one another, but they do not pretend to be other than what they are--there are no disguises here, only resemblances. The plot, so concerned with outward appearances, appropriately turns on the exchange of material objects--a Courtesan's ring, a gold chain, and the thousand marks that Egeon needs to save his life. Virtually all interior life is absent, and the action is entirely physical.

There are intimations of disturbing, even tragic issues in the story, of course--the plot depends on an initial threat of execution, and the play is filled with unsettling subjects. There are broken families, a troubled marriage, slavery, grief and anger, frequent violence, and a beheading lying in wait at the end of the day. But the play is not about these issues--it touches them briefly before skating on to happier, funnier subjects. The audience's moments of unease are brief and quickly give way to laughter.

And indeed, because this play is a comedy, everything that threatens the laughter is eliminated at the end. It is not only the characters' confusion that is relieved by the final scene, in which the "errors" are explained and resolved; all the darker, unpleasant issues are resolved, as well. Duke Solinus begins the play as a figure of unbending, almost tyrannical legalism; he ends it as a forgiving father figure. The broken halves of Egeon's family have been separated for more than 20 years; now they are put back together, and wife and husband fall into one another's arms as if time and distance had not intervened between them. The marriage of Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana is threatened by mutual jealousy; their reconciliation, once their misapprehensions have been cleared away, is the work of a few moments. And even the poor, abused slaves, the Dromios, quickly forget their beatings and bruises and embrace. The ease with which these problems are overcome points to the central theme of the play: Love and felicity will triumph over all.