Non-conformity in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Medea, and The Stranger
We are constantly being affected our surroundings. As a result, our attitudes and personalities are a product of our experiences and the various environments in which they occurred . Furthermore, the society we live in presents to us a set of standards, values, and givens that we may or may not agree with. In literature, the society plays a major role in affecting the characters' thoughts and actions. In The Sailor who Fell From Grace with the Sea, The Stranger, and "Medea", the characters are affected by their society, and their actions reflect their conformity (or non-conformity) to it. Ultimately, non-conformity in these works create the conflicts that make the plots interesting.
In Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea , the characters are presented with the relatively modern society of post World War 2 Japan. Since the war, as Japan underwent their "second" industrial revolution, it became more permeable to western culture(since it was a major contender of international business). Since Japan has always been a nation that stressed the importance of preserving its culture(imposing isolationism at one point), these changes did not go down so smoothly. Mishima expresses this discomfort by depicting two characters with opposite grounds of non-conformity. One being Fusako; a non-conformist in a traditional perspective, and the other Noboru, a non-conformist in a contemporary perspective.
In Albert Camus' The Stranger, society only affects the main character, Meursault, after he comes to a mid-story crisis. For all practical purposes, Meursault was living in a French society of the 30's, whereas Al...
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...rent does not conform.
The authors' relations to us on the characters' places in society help us to relate to and comprehend their actions. If Meursault hadn't been so detached from society, Noboru so discontented with society, and Medea so vengeful toward society, we wouldn't have half of the justification needed to understand the murders that took place in the works. Given the presented material about conformity, I conclude that the stories' plots indeed grow around the unique attributes of the non-conformers, and as result, spark the reader's imagination to the fullest.
Works Cited
Euripedes "Medea", Greece 431 BC
Camus, Albert (Translated by Matthew Ward) The Stranger , New York,
Vintage International, 1988
Mishima, Yukio. (Translated by John Nathan) The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, New York, Vintage International, 1993.
Wang Meng (c. 1308 – 1385) was a Chinese landscape painter during the Yuan Dynasty (c.1271–1368). Within his life, the Yuan Dynasty was ruled by the Mongol Empire; lots of turmoils and conflicts between nations were happening. To away from the secular, Wang chose to live in mountains and perhaps to have a simple life. “The Simple Retreat” could be one of Wang’s paintings that suggest the balance between nature and human. This painting is in a vertical roll composition, painted in a Northern Song Monumental mode: high, level and deep distance can be seen. From viewing this painting, midst to top describes layers of imposing mountains and the empty sky; the bottom half shows the retreat and the relationship among trees, rocks and river. On the
In The Stranger by Albert Camus, the main character, Meursault, is an absurdist who lives in the moment and refuses to be distracted by societal norms. He views the world as random and is indifferent to it. But to many French people living in Algeria, religion, social order and character are intertwined and are imperative to human life. Camus uses the crucifix and the courtroom to convey the idea that religion is man’s desperate attempt to create meaning in life where there is none.
Within many people, there lies a fascination that cannot be quenched unless people explore it to their hearts’ content. This zealotry devours the mind, leaving behind a maddening obsession that takes complete control. In Jon Krakauer's nonfiction work, Into the Wild, the main character, Chris McCandless, displays such a yearning as he travels to Alaska’s countryside, ignoring the advice of others, obsessively seeking to free himself from the chains that hold a materialistic world center. McCandless exists as a zealot searching for the wilderness, fanatically pursuing its fruits of spirituality and blessings of liberty.
Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 2007. Print. Using Vogler’s text, Medea was characterized as a hero fitting the trickster archetype. Medea’s transformation was explained and tracked down using the language of the Hero’s journey.
Pattillo references the benefits received by NKO as a result of its close proximity to Bronzeville, a predominantly African American community that was thriving as a black Mecca in the fifties and sixties with plentiful black businesses, which served as a safe haven for black life in Chicago. NKO was such a wondrous place that even the late Blues legend Muddy Waters called it home proving its allure. Unfortunately, when Dr. Pattillo shifts gears and provides context to the decline of NKO, she brings up the construction of the Olander Housing Projects, overcrowding as a result of subsidized housing along with increases in crime, drugs, and the rise of the poverty level. While her research is factual, she fails to mention the lack of middlemen by way of the black middle class to serve as conduits to prevent the unfortunate fate of NKO. She instead indirectly criminalizes and places blame on a number of variables specifically the residents of the projects with no mention of the emerging black middle class not using their power to evoke change in their respected
The police saw that the area needed extra supervision and went about patrolling the area for a couple of weeks, maybe months. When they found the crimes running back up in higher numbers, they just backed out since their patrolling didn’t matter. Once the people and the neighborhood are considered run down or “broken”, they’ll always be seen as something that can’t be fixed. In addition, they’re absolutely no eyes on the streets which is exactly what Jacobs would’ve turned away from. The streets aren’t safe, no one’s looking after all neighborhood kids or the belongings that keep getting robbed or stolen consistently. There’s also nothing keeping the teens safe anymore, not even a sports team near them or just any activity to keep give them somewhere to go or look forward to. There is nothing about lower Jersey City that makes it even close to equal to upper Jersey City. From education to opportunities and every other aspect, inequality is clearly evident in Westside and
Albert Camus is a skillful writer noted for showing aspects of culture and society through the depiction of his characters. In The Stranger, Camus illustrates the existentialism culture and how that comes into play in the life of the protagonist Meursault. The Stranger, as suggested by the title, is a novel revolving around the protagonist, Meursault, who is a stranger to the French-Algerian society as he challenges its values. Camus vividly portrays Meursault’s journey through the use of imagery, irony, and symbolism. In The Stranger, Albert Camus uses the minor character, Raymond Sintes, to illustrate the contrasting nature of Meursault and how his friendship with Raymond leads to his downfall.
This essay has compared the differences between the societies in these two novels. There is one great similarity however that both make me thankful for having been born into a freethinking society where a person can be truly free. Our present society may not be truly perfect, but as these two novels show, it could be worse.
Judaism is a religion with an excess of 13 million believers located mainly within the United States and Israel. Of all the religions practiced today, Judaism is one of the oldest. The roots of Judaism can be traced back over 3500 years to the Middle East with a lineage that descends from Abraham as a patriarch. With Abraham as a common ancestor, Judaism is considered one of the Abrahamic faiths alongside Christianity and Islam. The historical events within the Bible of Judaism’s past, all the way back to Abraham, have molded the beliefs and traditions practiced by Jewish adherents today.
Mishima, Yukio. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. New York: Knopf, 1965. Print.
Meursault and Daru are both “strangers” because they are not able to understand the other characters, which are each indirectly associated with an aspect of society. Camus uses the actions and words of seemingly unimportant characters to allude to the shortcomings of society. In both texts the protagonists view the other characters in the story from an outsider view, allowing for a new perspective in which society and its problems can be assessed. By making the protagonists detached from society, the underlying issues within society can be explored from an objective viewpoint.
• Mishima, Yukio. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965.
In The Stranger, Camus portrays women as unnecessary beings created purely to serve materialistically and satisfy males through the lack of a deep, meaningful, relationship between Meursault and females. Throughout the text, the main character, Meursault, creates closer, more meaningful relationships with other minor characters in the story. However, in his interactions with females in this book, Meursault’s thoughts and actions center on himself and his physical desires, observations, and feelings, rather than devoting his attention to the actual female. Living in Algiers in the 1960s, Meursault originates from a post-modernist time of the decline in emotion. Meursault simply defies the social expectations and societal ‘rules’, as post-modernists viewed the world. Rather than living as one gear in the ‘machine’ of society, Meursault defies this unwritten law in the lackluster relationships between he and other females, as well as his seemingly blissful eye to society itself. In The Stranger, males, not females, truly bring out the side of Meursault that has the capacity for compassion and a general, mutual feeling relationship. For example, Marie and Meursault’s relationship only demonstrate Meursault’s lack of an emotional appetite for her. Also, with the death of Maman, Meursault remains virtually unchanged in his thoughts and desires.
Ironically, Medea’s actions are similar to a man when she takes charge of her marriage, living situation, and family life when she devices a plan to engulf her husband with grief. With this in mind, Medea had accepts her place in a man’s world unti...
Themes in The Old Man and the Sea & nbsp; The Old Man and the Sea is a heroic tale of man’s strength pitted against forces he cannot control. It is a tale about an old Cuban fisherman and his three-day battle with a giant Marlin. Through the use of three prominent themes: friendship, bravery, and Christianity, the “Old Man and the Sea” strives to teach important life lessons to the reader. The relationship between the old man and the boy is introduced early in the story. They are unlikely companions; one is old and the other young, yet they share an incredible amount of respect and loyalty for each other.