The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense Of an Ending

                                                                                                                                                                    The Sense of an Ending  written by Julian Barnes. Apart from this, there are two lives ending in suicide in the novel. That of Robson and Adrian. It leads into the debate on the issue of suicide – issue of eros and thanatos. 

         

.  What is the meaning of phrase ‘Blood Money’ in Veronica’s reply email?

                 The right definition of 'Blood Money' is the money of paid by the murderer to victims family as a act of penance. Veronica who sees her mom responsible for Adrian Suicide refers the money Sarah left to Tony,Adrian's Friend and most likely to be the last surviving kin of Adrian's 'Blood Money'.

.  How do you decipher the equation: b = s – v x/+ a1 or a2 + v + a1 X s = b?

        1) b= s-v x/+ a1    It means B= baby and s= Sarah, v =Veronica, a1 =Adrian. And thus baby born.  B=Baby, S= Sarah, V=Veronica, a1= Adrian.A2+ V+ a1 X S =BA2= Antony Webster, V=Veronica, A1= Adrian, S= Sarah Ford, B=Baby, a1X s= a1’s relationship with S. So it indicates that the result of baby is the relationship between Adrian with Sarah .

.  Was the mentally retarded middle aged ‘Adrian’, Tony’s friend who did not commit suicide and was suffering from trauma and thus gone mad, and was living with hidden identity?

                As in the novel so many things are not clear and it’s also a possible that Adrian was guilty of his seen had gone mad, and that’s why He was leaving a secret life with hiding his identity. And it seems more logical if we consider Tony’s narration and memory reliable because he says in second part that Adrian was the only friend of our group who has great control over his emotions and, he was practical in his life so he can not commit suicide just because that he made his girlfriend pregnant. Or there should be some other reason. 

The Da Vinci Code task

 The DA VINCI CODE

 

Here are answers to these points mentioned above;

Suspense is a feeling of pleasurable fascination and excitement mixed with apprehension, tension, and anxiety developed from an unpredictable, mysterious, and rousing source of entertainment. In the kind of suspense described by film director Alfred Hitchcock, an audience experiences suspense when they expect something bad to happen and have a superior perspective on events in the drama's hierarchy of knowledge, yet they are powerless to intervene to prevent it from happening. Films having a lot of suspense belong in the thriller genre. So, the narration of Da Vinci Code is also same as suspense thriller. 

A conspiracy theory is an explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation.Conspiracy theory it means: 1. plan to commit illegal act together: a secret plan or agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal or subversive act 2. making of agreement by conspirators: the making of a secret plan or agreement to commit an illegal or subversive act 3. group of conspirators: a group of people planning or agreeing in secret to commit an illegal or subversive act.

In the history of Christianity Mary Magdalene’s role is very minor we cannot find any kind of information about her that actually who is she? Means she is a prostituted, wife of Jesus or anything else. She is very silent in the history of Christianity.

The beginning of the movie and novel quit different but I thought that movie’s beginning is very effective rather than novel. In novel Brown challenge the idea of Christianity. In Christianity male is in center and power position. Women are cause of fall of male. But in the movie he shows that woman are powerful. She is not fall of male but equal and rather than equal she is powerful and power position goes to woman not male. Jesus is not virgins but a married person. He has relation with Mary Magdalene; this was truth about Jesus life which was hidden in history. Because people do not wants power is goes to woman. 

 

In the novel we can see that writer make woman in the center means hear Jesus is not center of religion of Christianity but woman May Magdalene was the center. If we compare Neuye is powerful while beginning of the novel. But when novel moves n she becomes weaker and weaker rather than powerful. So here also we can find the problem that Langdon was depend upon Neuye in the first sense of the novel but then situation was change.  

Ophelia’s character was very weak because rather than face situation she like to end her life. So according to me it was not proper way she has to face situation and fight with it. So as a woman she is failed. Elizabeth form “Frankenstein” she was not much powerful but not weak also. Because she knows very well that what she wants to do and what she wants from. She able to take decision also. Hester form “Scarlet Letter”, she is very powerful according to me. Because what is wants to do she is able to do it in case. She is able to fight with whole society also

Oliver Twist

Introduction of Charlse dickens:-

      Charles John Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, was an English novelist and social critic. He created many most memorable fictional characters. He knew as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age or period. During his life, his works gave him name and fame. He was accepted as a novelist and writer by the critics and linguistics during those days. His novels and short stories become so popular.

 

          As a prolific 19th Century author of short stories, plays, novellas, novels, fiction and non-fiction, during his lifetime Dickens became known the world over for his remarkable characters, his mastery of prose in the telling of their lives, and his depictions of the social classes, mores and values of his times. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. On 8 June 1870, on 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Droid. He never regained consciousness, and the next day, on 9 June, five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash, he died at Gad's Hill Place.

              

His creative works are:

The Pickwick papers

David Copperfield

Oliver Twist

A Tale of two cities

Great Expectations

     Among his novels, here we are concerned with Oliver Twist, which is entitled as The Parish Boy's Progress and it is the second novel by major English novelist of the Victorian age. Oliver Twist is remembered for Dickens's unromantic portrayal of criminals and their social lives. The story deals with an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker.

Introduction of Novel: - Oliver Twist

     Oliver Twist is a novel which is written by famous English Author Charles Dickens. The novel is published by Richard Bentleyin in 1838. The story is about an Orphan child named Oliver Twist. He is protagonist. Oliver Twist endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes from workhouse. He travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naïvely unaware of their unlawful activities, Oliver is led to the lair of their elderly criminal trainer Fagin.

   This novel is a social novel; the book has dark side of society and evils of society. It has negative parts of society like child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful musical play and the multiple Academy Award winning 1968 motion picture made from it.

Bird view on the novel:

       In this novel Oliver is an orphan child, who born in a workhouse in a small town near London in the early part of 19^th century. His mother died immediately after his birth. Nobody knows who she was. It was clear that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Oliver lived in a “Child Farm” and brought up here until he is 8 years old. At the age of eight the Parish official running the child farm decided that it is time to start working. So at the age of 8 years, an orphan child has to start working. Then Oliver also sends to work house. At the working house Oliver ask for more foods with famous quotation:

“Please sir, I want some more!”

         

         At the orphan house Oliver made some misbehave, Oliver commits the unpardonable offense of asking for more food when he is close to starving. So the parish officials offer five pounds to anyone who is willing to take Oliver on as an apprentice. Here authority got some persons who wanted to, adopt him and took Oliver to his home.  Dickens characterizes Oliver as "a close prisoner in the dark and solitary room to which he had been consigned by the wisdom and mercy of the board." The parish officials eventually send Oliver off with a coffin-maker.

        Here, At the coffin-maker’s shop, Oliver got good food, Good clothes and batter condition of living life. At the coffin-maker’s shop, Oliver is treated much better than he was at the workhouse or the child farm. The coffin-maker, Mr. Sowerberry, isn’t so bad, but his wife, Mrs. Sowerberry, and the other apprentice, Noah Claypole, have it in for Oliver from the start.  Noah told something bad about mother of Oliver, so he got angry and both of the fought. Oliver badly beat Noah. Oliver gets in trouble for knocking Noah down. After being abused some more, Oliver decides to set out for London on foot. Now Oliver ran away from that family and went to London. When he’s almost there, he runs into an odd-looking young man named Jack Dawkins. He Dodger buys him lunch and offers to introduce him to a "gentleman" in London who will give him a place to stay. Once in London, it quickly becomes clear to the reader that the Dodger and his friends are an unsavory bunch. Then Dodger introduces Oliver with Fagin. Fagin was a inhuman and cunning person.

            The old "gentleman," Fagin, trains kids to be pickpockets, and then he sells off what they steal. But Oliver doesn’t Realize what’s up until he’s actually out with the Dodger and another one of the boys, named Charley Bates. Oliver sees the pair steal the pocket handkerchief out of a nice-looking old man's pocket. When Oliver turns to run away, the nice-looking old man sees him run and yells, "stop, thief!" Oliver is tackled in the street, but by then the nice old man - his name is Mr. Brownlow has taken a better look at him.  He realized that Oliver looks too sweet and innocent to be a pickpocket. In fact, Oliver isn’t so much a pick-pocket as he is a very sick little boy. So Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver home and cares for him until he’s well. Unfortunately Fagin, the Dodger, Nancy (a prostitute), and Bill Sikes (another criminal) are worried that Oliver will rat them out to the police, so they keep a watch on Brownlow’s house.

            One day, when Brownlow entrusts Oliver with some money and an errand to run in the city, Fagin and the criminals nab the poor kid once again. Nancy feels guilty and steps in to defend Oliver when Fagin tries to smack him around. Fagin keeps Oliver shut up in a dreary old house for weeks, all the while still trying to turn him into a criminal. How long can a Nine-year-old hold out?  Not long afterwards, Bill Sikes and another thief say they need a small boy to help them break into a house outside of London; Fagin volunteers Oliver. The plan goes awry when the servants of the house wake up and catch Oliver in the act of sneaking in. The servants don’t realize that Oliver is there against his will, and was actually about to wake up the household to warn them about the robbers. So poor Oliver takes a bullet and is left behind when the rest are all running away. Fortunately, Oliver is picked up by the people who shot him, a family that turns out to be as nice as Mr. Brownlow.  They become Oliver’s caretakers. Meanwhile, Fagin is at his wits’ end wondering what happened to Oliver. He lets slip that a mysterious man named Monks offered to pay him hundreds of pounds to corrupt the young boy. Nancy pretends not to know what’s going on, but secretly resolves to help Oliver, and to figure out why Monks is so keen on having Oliver turn to crime.

             While Fagin and the criminals distress, Oliver learns to read and write with his new friends, the Maylies. He's also reunited with his first friend, Mr. Brownlow. Fagin and his gang are still trying to track Oliver down. Monks has managed to get hold of – and destroy – one of the few surviving tokens of Oliver’s parentage. Nancy finds out about it and gets in touch with Rose Maylie to warn her about Monks’s plot with Fagin.

            Unfortunately for Nancy, Bill Sikes (her lover) finds out about it and brutally murders her. Sikes tries to escape, but he’s haunted by what he’s done. Eventually, he's killed while trying to escape from the police: he falls off a rooftop while he’s trying to lower himself down, and inadvertently hangs himself.  Meanwhile, Mr. Brownlow has managed to find Monks. Mr. Brownlow was an old friend of Monks’ father and knows all about him. As it turns out, Monks is actually the older half-brother of Oliver, and was trying to corrupt Oliver so that he’d secure the entire family inheritance himself. Monks chooses to admit to everything rather than face the police.  Oliver ends up with what’s left of his inheritance, is legally adopted by Mr. Brownlow, and lives down the road from the Maylies. Everybody lives happily ever after.

 Except for Fagin, who is arrested and hanged, and Monks, who dies in prison.

Those are important characters of Novel. Oliver is protagonist and centre character of the novel.

Old Man and The Sea.

Old man and the sea:-

                   For 84 days, the old fisherman Santiago has caught   nothing. Alone, impoverished, and facing his own mortality, Santiago is now considered unlucky. So Manolin (Santiago's fishing partner until recently and the young man Santiago has taught since the age of five) has been constrained by his parents to fish in another, more productive boat. Every evening, though, when Santiago again returns empty-handed, Manolin helps carry home the old man's equipment, keeps him company, and brings him food.

                     On the morning of the 85th day, Santiago sets out before dawn on a three-day odyssey that takes him far out to sea. In search of an epic catch, he eventually does snag a marlin of epic proportions, enduring tremendous hardship to land the great fish. He straps the marlin along the length of his skiff and heads for home, hardly believing his own victory. Within an hour, a mako shark attacks the marlin, tearing away a great hunk of its flesh and mutilating Santiago's prize. Santiago fights the mako, enduring great suffering, and eventually kills it with his harpoon, which he loses in the struggle.

                    The great tear in the marlin's flesh releases the fish's blood and scent into the water, attracting packs of shovel-nosed sharks. With whatever equipment remains on board, Santiago repeatedly fights off the packs of these scavengers, enduring exhaustion and great physical pain, even tearing something in his chest. Eventually, the sharks pick the marlin clean. Defeated, Santiago reaches shore and beaches the skiff. Alone in the dark, he looks back at the marlin's skeleton in the reflection from a street light and then stumbles home to his shack, falling face down onto his cot in exhaustion. 

                  The next morning, Manolin finds Santiago in his hut and cries over the old man's injuries. Manolin fetches coffee and hears from the other fisherman what he had already seen — that the marlin's skeleton lashed to the skiff is eighteen feet long, the greatest fish the village has known. Manolin sits with Santiago until he awakes and then gives the old man some coffee. The old man tells Manolin that he was beaten. But Manolin reassures him that the great fish didn't beat him and that they will fish together again, that luck doesn't matter, and that the old man still has much to teach him.

                That afternoon, some tourists see the marlin's skeleton waiting to go out with the tide and ask a waiter what it is. Trying to explain what happened to the marlin, the waiter replies, "Eshark." But the tourists misunderstand and assume that's what the skeleton is.

           Back in his shack, with Manolin sitting beside him, Santiago sleeps again and dreams of the young lions he had seen along the coast of Africa when he was a young man.

To The Light House

introduction of Virginia Woolf:-

 

 

   

   
            Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, a descendant of one of Victorian England’s most prestigious literary families. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and was married to the daughter of the writer William Thackeray. 

            Woolf grew up among the most important and influential British intellectuals of her time, and received free rein to explore her father’s library. Her personal connections and abundant talent soon opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that she found herself in “a position where it was easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure.” Almost from the beginning, her life was a precarious balance of extraordinary success and mental instability.

         As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious Times Literary Supplement, and as an adult she quickly found herself at the center of England’s most important literary community. Known as the “Bloomsbury Group” after the section of London in which its members lived, this group of writers, artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure, and intellectual freedom, and included such luminaries as the painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Working among such an inspirational group of peers and possessing an incredible talent in her own right, Woolf published her most famous novels by the mid-1920s, including The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. With these works she reached the pinnacle of her profession.

               Woolf’s life was equally dominated by mental illness. Her parents died when she was young—her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904—and she was prone to intense, terrible headaches and emotional breakdowns. After her father’s death, she attempted suicide, throwing herself out a window. Though she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved him deeply, she was not entirely satisfied romantically or sexually. For years she sustained an intimate relationship with the novelist Vita Sackville-West. Late in life, Woolf became terrified by the idea that another nervous breakdown was close at hand, one from which she would not recover. On March 28, 1941, she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to spoil his life by going mad. She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.

             Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree as well as her struggle to find meaning in her own unsteady existence. Written in a poised, understated, and elegant style, her work examines the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to the experience of time. Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant to her era and literary circle. Throughout her work she celebrates and analyzes the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence. Moreover, her stream-of-consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the work of the French thinker Henri Bergson and the novelists Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

       This style allows the subjective mental processes of Woolf’s characters to determine the objective content of her narrative. In To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for example, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock.

        The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed into a few dozen pages. Many readers of To the Lighthouse, especially those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find the novel strange and difficult. Its language is dense and the structure amorphous. Compared with the plot-driven Victorian novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way of action. Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds.

            Although To the Lighthouse is a radical departure from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like its more traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing characters and advancing both plot and themes. Woolf’s experimentation has much to do with the time in which she lived: the turn of the century was marked by bold scientific developments. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined an unquestioned faith in God that was, until that point, nearly universal, while the rise of psychoanalysis, a movement led by Sigmund Freud, introduced the idea of an unconscious mind.

            Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence on the styles and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those in the Bloomsbury Group. To the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist. With its characters based on her own parents and siblings, it is certainly her most autobiographical fictional statement, and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and analyzes, feels and interacts.