Criticism

Recently, I reread an old college essay I wrote on Graham Greene’s bleak classic, The Heart of the Matter. Immersing myself in thoughts which consumed my every waking hour for a whole semester two years ago, I remembered in a flash how dissatisfied I had been with the resolution of the piece…

I was in a serious slump this February, drowning in a sea of unaccomplished tasks all loudly condemning my laziness and inefficiency. I felt incapable of stirring up my own enthusiasm for life to get my head above water, no matter how well I organized my planner or how early I set my alarm. But now it’s March, and things are looking up! My long and daunting to-do list is finally beginning to shrink. I’m not saying this to brag. On the contrary, I’m entirely clueless as to how I emerged from my unproductive hibernation…

The first chapter of Charles Dickens’s classic, Great Expectations, deserves its reputation as one of the great openers in literature. The tiny orphan Pip stands at the graveside of his parents, quietly mourning his lonely estate. Suddenly, a fearsome convict, lately escaped from a nearby prison ship, accosts him from the surrounding mists and demands food on pain of death. Pip’s terror in this moment is every bit as palpable as was his grief a moment before. He hurries back to the smithy where he makes his home and, oppressed by unspeakable terror and guilt, steals food from his sister and her mild-mannered husband, Joe Gargery. I have always thought it remarkable how completely Pip earns our pity in these first scenes…

“In sorrow, seek happiness.” So says Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s literary homage to the problem of pain and suffering. A murder mystery extraordinaire, this novel traces the history of one Ivan Karamazov, eldest brother of the Karamazovs and an intellectual humanist. Frustrated by the problem of evil and its implications regarding the nature of God and His posture toward man, Ivan conceives of atheism as a kind of work around…

I’ve been reading a lot of children’s literature recently, due to my role as the Elementary teacher here at CenterForLit. We just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and I was struck by the youngest brother, Edmund’s, character development. Not a baby any longer to be coddled by his mother or sister, but not yet mature enough to claim a leader’s role like Peter, Edmund is half-baked, sullen, and in-process. When he first comes to Narnia, he falls in with a dangerous crowd. Immature and lustful for recognition and power, he pledges his loyalty to the White Witch and betrays his family to secure his ambition, all within the first few chapters of the story. Not a stellar beginning, you might say. Sheepishly, I will admit that he’s the character with whom I identify the most…