“The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock”
Summary

This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published
until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—
overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to
be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis” by
somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to “dare” an
approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies,
and he chides himself for “presuming” emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem
moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings—a cityscape (the famous
“patient etherised upon a table”) and several interiors (women’s arms in the lamplight, coffee
spoons, fireplaces)—to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock’s emotional distance
from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status (“I am not Prince Hamlet’).
“Prufrock” is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of
character achieved.

Form

“Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot’s
predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize
the dramatic monologue, according to M.H. Abrams. First, they are the utterances of a specific
individual (not the poet) at a specific moment in time. Secondly, the monologue is specifically
directed at a listener or listeners whose presence is not directly referenced but is merely
suggested in the speaker’s words. Third, the primary focus is the development and revelation of
the speaker’s character. Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and
focusing on Prufrock’s interiority and isolation. The epigraph to this poem, from Dante’s
Inferno, describes Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never
betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present confessions. In the world Prufrock
describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with
silent reflection. In its focus on character and its dramatic sensibility, “Prufrock” anticipates
Eliot’s later, dramatic works.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may
resemble free verse, in reality, “Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms.
The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the poem is read aloud. One of
the most prominent formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock’s continual
return to the “women [who] come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and his recurrent
questionings (“how should I presume?”) and pessimistic appraisals (“That is not it, at all.”) both
reference an earlier poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern,
neurotic individual. Prufrock’s obsessiveness is aesthetic, but it is also a sign of compulsiveness
and isolation. Another important formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form,
particularly at the poem’s conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are rhymed as the conclusion
of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic, anti-romantic content, coupled with the
despairing interjection, “I do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me,” creates a contrast
that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.

Commentary

“Prufrock” displays the two most important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry. First, it is
strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, whom
Eliot had been reading almost constantly while writing the poem. From the Symbolists, Eliot
takes his sensuous language and eye for unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless
contributes to the overall beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-covered arms of the
women are two good examples of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of
individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker.
However, whereas the Symbolists would have been more likely to make their speaker himself a
poet or artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for the
common man.

The second defining characteristic of this poem is its use of fragmentation and juxtaposition.
Eliot sustained his interest in fragmentation and its applications throughout his career, and his
use of the technique changes in important ways across his body of work: Here, the subjects
undergoing fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of imagery; in The
Waste Land, it is modern culture that splinters; in the Four Quartets we find the fragments of
attempted philosophical systems. Eliot’s use of bits and pieces of formal structure suggests that
fragmentation, although anxiety-provoking, is nevertheless productive; had he chosen to write in
free verse, the poem would have seemed much more nihilistic. The kinds of imagery Eliot uses
also suggest that something new can be made from the ruins: The series of hypothetical
encounters at the poem’s center are iterated and discontinuous but nevertheless lead to a sort of
epiphany (albeit a dark one) rather than just leading nowhere. Eliot also introduces an image that
will recur in his later poetry, that of the scavenger. Prufrock thinks that he “should have been a
pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Crabs are scavengers, garbage-
eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea floor. Eliot’s discussions of his own
poetic technique (see especially his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) suggest that
making something beautiful out of the refuse of modern life, as a crab sustains and nourishes
itself on garbage, may, in fact, be the highest form of art. At the very least, this notion subverts
romantic ideals about art; at best, it suggests that fragments may become reintegrated, that art
may be in some way therapeutic for a broken modern world. In The Waste Land, crabs become
rats, and the optimism disappears, but here Eliot seems to assert only the limitless potential of
scavenging.

“Prufrock” ends with the hero assigning himself a role in one of Shakespeare’s plays: While he is
no Hamlet, he may yet be useful and important as “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a
progress, start a scene or two...” This implies that there is still a continuity between
Shakespeare’s world and ours, that Hamlet is still relevant to us and that we are still part of a
world that could produce something like Shakespeare’s plays. Implicit in this, of course, is the
suggestion that Eliot, who has created an “attendant lord,” may now go on to create another
Hamlet. While “Prufrock” ends with a devaluation of its hero, it exalts its creator. Or does it?
The last line of the poem suggests otherwise—that when the world intrudes, when “human
voices wake us,” the dream is shattered: “we drown.” With this single line, Eliot dismantles the
romantic notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to triumph over the destructive,
impersonal forces of the modern world. In reality, Eliot the poet is little better than his creation:
He differs from Prufrock only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows through from time to
time. Eliot’s poetic creation, thus, mirrors Prufrock’s soliloquy: Both are an expression of
aesthetic ability and sensitivity that seems to have no place in the modern world. This realistic,
anti-romantic outlook sets the stage for Eliot’s later works, including The Waste Land.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by:-graham greene
THEME
Futility
Scobie's life pulls him along on a path from which he cannot seem to deviate. At the beginning
of the novel, he appears content with his mundane life in the colony and does not particularly
care about advancing; he notices the flaws of the justice system but just accepts them instead of
trying to fight against corruption. He does not actively work on his lackluster marriage but
rather, develops coping mechanisms to keep it afloat. Scobie's relationship with Helen eventually
mirrors his marriage to Louise, but like his marriage, he cannot bring himself to end the affair.
The situation with Yusef also spirals out of control; Scobie simply watches it happen. He is
complacent through most of the events of the novel, except when Ali is killed. Even Scobie's
choice to commit suicide seems futile; he does not particularly want to die, but because he
cannot conceive of choosing between God and Helen, he chooses to opt out completely.

Responsibility
Scobie’s profound sense of responsibility is a manifestation of his pride. He feels pity for Louise
and Helen and takes the responsibility of their happiness squarely on his shoulders, even though
he does not love Louise and his love for Helen means eternal damnation. Scobie often feels
overwhelmed by this sense of responsibility and wonders why God gave it to him. Greene
himself identifies Scobie as "a weak man with good intentions doomed by his big sense of pity."

Surveillance
The colony is full of gossip and spies, and surveillance and observation are key themes of the
novel. Everyone knows everyone else’s affairs, and even the priest, Father Rank, is a great
gossip. False rumors surround Scobie from the beginning of the novel, but he does not care until
those rumors start to contain a kernel of truth. After he has become entangled with Yusuf and
Helen, Scobie constantly believes that people are watching him, which leads him make rash
decisions that have terrible consequences - like Ali's death. Scobie certainly is being watched –
everyone in the colony knows he is having an affair, for example – but Scobie misinterprets the
gravity of his failings. He believes that his sins are so vast that his mere existence is an insult to
God - which ultimately leads him to take his own life.

Self-awareness
Some of Greene’s characters are self-aware: Louise understands Scobie does not love her and
understands how to alleviate her own suffering; Helen completely understands the truth about
her relationship with Scobie, even if she doesn't always like it. However, the novel’s protagonist
lacks self-awareness. Greene spends a great deal of the novel calling attention to Scobie’s
ineffectiveness as a police officer; his limited perspective often causes him to miss the big
picture. Louise understands Scobie better than he knows; she comments glibly to Wilson that
Scobie only sees what he wants to see. Meanwhile, Scobie's affair with Helen comes as a shock
to him, as if he was not complicit in starting it. He wilfully ignores Wilson’s true identity for
much of the novel, and he does not fully accept how dangerous Yusuf is until it is too late. In the
second half of the novel, Scobie vacillates between leaving Helen and staying with her. With
Scobie's decision to commit suicide at the end of the novel, Greene seems to suggest that Scobie
did not really know himself at all. Father Rank muses that Scobie loved God more than anyone
else, a statement that Scobie no doubt would have been surprised to hear.

Religion
In the novel, Greene divides his exploration of religion into two separate planes. There are the
rituals and teachings of the Catholic Church and then, there is the private relationship that exists
between God and man. The Church provides rules, structure, and order, but Greene suggests that
organized religion cannot account for all the complexities of the human condition. Scobie's
relationship with God defines him and leads him to choose suicide in order to avoid a life in
which he flouts the principles of the Church. However, Father Rank suggests that God
understands that Scobie's suicide was ultimately a result of his overwhelming faith. Greene
makes the controversial assertion that the Church's definition of faith is limited and that God may
bend some of his "rules" for his children. While Louise is the character that actually follows the
Church's rituals, Scobie cannot even bear to keep living with the realization that he has
disappointed God.

Isolation
For all of the physical entanglements between the characters in The Heart of the Matter, they are
all profoundly isolated from one another on an emotional level. Even when they try to connect,
they suffer from a breakdown in communication. In this way, Greene seems to suggest that many
of these characters would be better off alone -Scobie is most happy when he in the darkened
quiet with just Ali by his side. Helen is happier without Scobie's tortured love for her, Louise
finds contentment away from the colony and her husband's pity (and only returns once she hears
about his affair). In addition to being isolated from each other, Greene's characters are also
isolated from God - especially Scobie. He believes his sins to be so severe that he cannot live
knowing that he has disappointed God. Meanwhile, Louise goes through the rituals of her
religion but does not seem to find any peace.

Failure
The novel is not a particularly "happy" one; almost all of the characters fail in their endeavors
(even when their goals are completely attainable). Louise wants Scobie to get a promotion but
right after he gets it he commits suicide and she does not get to be a Commissioner's wife. Even
with all his poetry, Wilson cannot make Louise love him. Helen loses Scobie and ends up with
Bagster, despite trying to resist the drunken man's inelegant overtures. Scobie fails in almost all
of his endeavors, especially those centered around his "responsibility" for others. He fails at
being a good husband, a good employee, and a good Catholic. Ironically enough, Father Rank
suggests that Scobie may even fail at being damned for his sins! Overall, Greene suggests that
failure is a part of life. Human beings can only seek to know themselves and strive to find
happiness wherever they can.

The Heart of the Matter Summary

Scobie is a police officer in a colony in British West Africa during World War II. He is married
to Louise, an intellectual woman. They had one daughter, Catherine, who died many years ago.
Both of the Scobies are Catholic. Scobie does not actually love his wife, but he pities her and
feels a great deal of responsibility for her happiness. He enjoys his job, but Louise is frustrated
when he is passed over for the Commissioner's position because of unproven rumors about
infidelity and corruption. Louise is miserable with colony life and begs Scobie to send her to
South Africa - he can come join her after he retires. Scobie promises to find a way to get the
money to secure her passage.

A young man named Wilson is new to the colony; Greene later reveals him to be a spy and an
inspector. Wilson strikes up a friendship with Louise over their shared love of poetry. After
meeting her only a few times, Wilson falls in love with Louise, but she does not return his
sentiments. Meanwhile, Scobie tries to borrow money from the bank but his loan application is
rejected. Finally, Scobie turns to a disreputable Syrian trader named Yusef. Louise is able to
leave the colony and Scobie feels an immense sense of peace and happiness, although he has
become rather ambivalent about his faith.

One day, there is a shipwreck at sea and the survivors arrive in the West African colony. Scobie
befriends one of the survivors, a young woman named Helen Rolt. That friendship soon
blossoms into a romance. As a result, Scobie starts to feel a deep sense of responsibility for
Helen as well. Scobie constructs a complicated web of lies in order to keep the relationship
secret. In addition, he invents even more falsehoods to avoid being implicated in Yusef's
scandalous business of selling contraband diamonds.

Scobie and Helen's relationship becomes predictably quotidian; she claims that he does not love
her and is using his Catholicism to avoid divorcing his wife. They fight bitterly, but Scobie
remains committed to Helen. He continually feels the weight of his religion, however, and
vacillates between breaking up with Helen and following God's path.

Scobie receives a telegram from Louise saying that she has made a mistake and is coming back.
This infuriates Helen and they have another explosive fight, but she later apologizes and says she
will do anything for him. Scobie, for his part, feels oppressed and trapped; he begins to think that
people are spying on him. He faces official questioning about his role in the Tallit/Yusef affair
and starts to question Wilson's identity. Scobie even begins to suspect his young servant boy,
Ali, whom he has long loved and trusted.

Louise returns to the colony and insists that she and Scobie renew their faith and begin attending
Mass and Communion. He resignedly agrees but avoids going to church for a while due to his
guilt over his indiscretions. He finally goes to Confession and tells the local priest, Father Rank,
about his adultery. However, it is a troubling encounter because Scobie cannot bring himself to
repent fully for his affair with Helen. Father Rank says he will pray for Scobie.

Scobie's paranoia matches his concerns about his soul. He tells Yusef that he is worried about
Ali's loyalty and wonders what he might know. Yusef takes care of the problem by killing Ali.
Even though Scobie was unaware of Yusuf's intent, he feels partially responsible for the Ali's
fate and broods over his propensity for causing pain to others.

Scobie continues to go to church but still feels like an outsider. However, his professional life
improves when he is awarded the Commissioner position after all. He has a chance encounter
with Helen, who has largely left him alone since Louise returned. Helen tells Scobie that she is
leaving the colony and wants to make it easy on him, but he cannot extricate himself the
relationship and tells her he will figure out a plan.

Scobie formulates a plan to commit suicide. Because he has long complained of ill health, a local
doctor prescribes Scobie some medication for his heart. He takes some each night but saves a
dose for one night fixed in the near future. He wants his death to look natural; he does not want
anyone to know that he has committed suicide. He wrestles with his idea of God, but ultimately
believes that he must kill himself because he cannot keep living a life of adultery on without
repenting. He takes the medication with a glass of whiskey and dies.

After Scobie's death, Louise and Wilson talk. Louise knew all along Scobie was having an affair, which is
why she came home. Clearly, Scobie was very bad keeping secrets. Similarly, Wilson's keen eyes allow
him to suspect that Scobie retroactively added diary entries about sleeping troubles and heart pain in his
efforts to conceal the reality of his death. Louise is shocked. She visits Father Rank and excoriates Scobie
for being a bad Catholic. However, Father Rank gently reminds Louise that they cannot judge Scobie's
heart and that the rules of the Church are not what determine one's eternal fate. To Rank, it seems like
Scobie loved God more than anyone else, even himself.

A reading of Eliot’s classic essay {unit:iv} core cc:xii

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The
Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was
written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who had been living in
London for the last few years, and who had published his first volume of poems, Prufrock and
Other Observations, in 1917. You can read ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ here.

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in helping
new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing – indeed, of
much modernism – that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly
and more pointedly than previous poets had. This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-
Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of
tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante
are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth
century do. James Joyce looked back to ancient Greek myth (the story of Odysseus) for his novel
set in modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours and
poets of the Middle Ages. H. D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek references and ideas. As
Eliot puts it, ‘Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much
more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’ He goes on to argue that a
modern poet should write with the literature of all previous ages ‘in his bones’, as though Homer
and Shakespeare were his (or her) contemporaries: ‘This historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what
makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious
of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.’

In short, knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers both part of that tradition
and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own poetry, for instance, is simultaneously in the
tradition of Homer and Dante and the work of a modern poet, and it is because of his debt to
Homer and Dante that he is both modern and traditional. If this sounds like a paradox, consider
how Shakespeare is often considered both a ‘timeless’ poet (‘Not of an age, but for all time’, as
his friend Ben Jonson said) whose work is constantly being reinvented, but is also understood in

the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political attitudes. Similarly, in using Dante
in his own poetry, Eliot at once makes Dante ‘modern’ and contemporary, and himself – by
association – part of the wider poetic tradition.

Eliot’s essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. That is, the poet’s personality
does not matter, as it’s the poetry that s/he produces that is important. Famously, he observes:
‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and
emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

This is more or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement (in the ‘Preface’ to
Lyrical Ballads in 1800) that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. Once
again, Eliot sets himself apart from such a Romantic notion of poetry. This is in keeping with his
earlier argument about the importance of tradition: the poet’s personality does not matter, only
how their work responds to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.

Eliot’s example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet who wrote The Odyssey
for certain, but we don’t need to. The Odyssey itself is what matters, not the man (or men – or
woman!) who wrote it. Poetry should be timeless and universal, transcending the circumstances
out of which it grew, and transcending the poet’s own generation and lifetime. (Eliot’s argument
raises an interesting question: can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. by confessional poets like
Sylvia Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also be timeless and universal? Evidently it
can, as these poets’ works have outlived the poets who wrote them.)

We might also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often incorporated part of
themselves into their work – he would do it himself, so that, although it would be naive to read
The Waste Land as being ‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his first wife, we can nevertheless see
aspects of his marriage informing the poem. And in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’,
Eliot would acknowledge that the poet of poets, Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the
Bard ‘was occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his
personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and
impersonal’. For Eliot, great poets turn personal experience into impersonal poetry, but this
nevertheless means that their poetry often stems from the personal. It is the poet’s task to
transmute personal feelings into something more universal. Eliot is rather vague about how a
poet is to do this – leaving others to ponder it at length.

FASTING,FEASTING BY:ANITA DESAI {UNIT:III} CORE CC:XI

SUMMARY

. In Fasting, Feasting Desai focuses on the children of a conservative, upper-middle-class Indian

family living in a provincial town southwest of Bombay. Desai is as much interested in the
family dynamics as in the effects of strict patriarchy on the next generation.

As the novel opens, husband and wife, who have become so much like one person that Uma
refers to them as MamaPapa, sit on their favorite veranda swing. The place is symbolic for the
static nature of their lives now that Papa has retired as a lawyer and his children are adults. Uma
is there to serve them, even though she is forty-three, but unmarried. Here, such rituals of
patriarchy are performed, as when Uma fetches an orange that Mama carefully peels, slices, and
skins before handing each sliver to Papa.

In keeping with Desai’s desire to tell the truth in her fiction, even if it is painful, Uma is denied
much possibility to develop. Through her flashbacks it is revealed that she was denied the
opportunity to go to her beloved convent school when she was fifteen, and she was forced to
return to her parents when she ran away to attend the school. Mama decided to arrange a
marriage for her at age sixteen, but the prospective groom scandalized the family when he fell in
love with her younger sister Aruna. Uma then joined her widowed aunt Mira-masi on a
pilgrimage to a temple, where she longed to stay but was taken home again. In Mira-masi, the
reader meets one of Desai’s wizened old women who have taken to spirituality as an act of
defiance.

The next attempts to marry off Uma also were failures. The second fiancé’s family just took her
dowry, and the third married Uma in a nightmare version of a traditional wedding and intended
to enslave her as a second wife. For once, she was saved by Papa.

Uma’s fate is not the worst, as Desai shows through the other female characters around her.
Beautiful, intelligent Anamika wins a scholarship to Oxford she is never allowed to accept
because of her early marriage. Bullied by her mother-in-law, Anamika is most likely killed by
her husband, who masks her death as suicide. Even Uma’s younger sister Aruna, who marries a
successful man whom she dominates, is trapped by her desire for perfection. Happier alternatives
are hinted at in women like Doctor Dutt and young Moyna, daughter of the neighbor Mrs. Joshi,
who also has a career. However, the first part of the novel ends with the dispersal of Anamika’s
ashes, witnessed by a grieving Uma.
The second part of the novel tells of Arun’s first summer holiday in Massachusetts, where he has
gone to study. He is invited to stay with the Pattons, a suburban family. Critics have complained
that the Pattons are a bit of a caricature. Mr. Patton is a steak-eating businessman who bosses his
wife and children; Mrs. Patton is a closet vegetarian who seeks survival through evasion;
daughter Melanie is anorexic; and son Rod is a passionate jogger and football player. At the end
of the novel, formal closure is achieved as Arun gives a grateful Mrs. Patton the shawl and tea
that his parents made Uma send him.

Fasting, Feasting works best when it focuses on the Indian family. Even though Uma and Mama
can share a joke alone on the swing, the limits of Uma’s life imposed by patriarchy are painfully
obvious. Desai’s look at America is deliberately that of an outsider like Arun, who sees irony in
everyday life. Desai had planned to write a third, humorous part of the novel, telling of Arun’s
return to India after graduation, but instead she published it as the short story “The Rooftop
Dwellers” in her collection Diamond Dust: Stories.

THEMES

In Fasting, Feasting Desai focuses on the children of a conservative, upper-middle-class Indian

family living in a provincial town southwest of Bombay. Desai is as much interested in the
family dynamics as in the effects of strict patriarchy on the next generation.

As the novel opens, husband and wife, who have become so much like one person that Uma
refers to them as MamaPapa, sit on their favorite veranda swing. The place is symbolic for the
static nature of their lives now that Papa has retired as a lawyer and his children are adults. Uma
is there to serve them, even though she is forty-three, but unmarried. Here, such rituals of
patriarchy are performed, as when Uma fetches an orange that Mama carefully peels, slices, and
skins before handing each sliver to Papa.

In keeping with Desai’s desire to tell the truth in her fiction, even if it is painful, Uma is denied
much possibility to develop. Through her flashbacks it is revealed that she was denied the
opportunity to go to her beloved convent school when she was fifteen, and she was forced to
return to her parents when she ran away to attend the school. Mama decided to arrange a
marriage for her at age sixteen, but the prospective groom scandalized the family when he fell in
love with her younger sister Aruna. Uma then joined her widowed aunt Mira-masi on a
pilgrimage to a temple, where she longed to stay but was taken home again. In Mira-masi, the
reader meets one of Desai’s wizened old women who have taken to spirituality as an act of
defiance.

The next attempts to marry off Uma also were failures. The second fiancé’s family just took her
dowry, and the third married Uma in a nightmare version of a traditional wedding and intended
to enslave her as a second wife. For once, she was saved by Papa.

Uma’s fate is not the worst, as Desai shows through the other female characters around her.
Beautiful, intelligent Anamika wins a scholarship to Oxford she is never allowed to accept
because of her early marriage. Bullied by her mother-in-law, Anamika is most likely killed by
her husband, who masks her death as suicide. Even Uma’s younger sister Aruna, who marries a
successful man whom she dominates, is trapped by her desire for perfection. Happier alternatives
are hinted at in women like Doctor Dutt and young Moyna, daughter of the neighbor Mrs. Joshi,
who also has a career. However, the first part of the novel ends with the dispersal of Anamika’s
ashes, witnessed by a grieving Uma.

The second part of the novel tells of Arun’s first summer holiday in Massachusetts, where he has
gone to study. He is invited to stay with the Pattons, a suburban family. Critics have complained
that the Pattons are a bit of a caricature. Mr. Patton is a steak-eating businessman who bosses his
wife and children; Mrs. Patton is a closet vegetarian who seeks survival through evasion;
daughter Melanie is anorexic; and son Rod is a passionate jogger and football player. At the end
of the novel, formal closure is achieved as Arun gives a grateful Mrs. Patton the shawl and tea
that his parents made Uma send him.

Fasting, Feasting works best when it focuses on the Indian family. Even though Uma and Mama
can share a joke alone on the swing, the limits of Uma’s life imposed by patriarchy are painfully
obvious. Desai’s look at America is deliberately that of an outsider like Arun, who sees irony in
everyday life. Desai had planned to write a third, humorous part of the novel, telling of Arun’s
return to India after graduation, but instead she published it as the short story “The Rooftop
Dwellers” in her collection Diamond Dust: Stories.
SULA BY:TONI MORRISON {UNIT:IV} CORE:XI

Sula is a novel about self-creation, about women, about men, and about a culture. The girls, Sula
and Nel, realize early on that the world does not easily accommodate people such as them:
“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all
freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they set about creating something else to be.” They
would be black women. That means something different to each of them. For Nel, it means
becoming a wife and mother, sustaining the values of the community. For Sula, it means living
an “experimental life,” rejecting commonly held values. Nel tells Sula, “You can’t do it all. You
a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all
independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t.” Sula
will not accept such limitations. When Nel demands to know what Sula has gained from her
choices—having no husband and no children; her grandmother put away in a nursing home; her
mother, father, and uncle dead; residents of the Bottom all despising her—Sula responds, “Girl, I
got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.” Nel, on the other hand, has
loneliness, an empty space that Jude used to fill, and another one Sula formerly occupied. Sula’s
self-knowledge and Nel’s connection to other people are both essential to human existence. Each
woman, even if only momentarily, comes to understand that.

Fire and water are recurrent devices throughout the novel, demonstrating the destructive forces
always threatening the individual self. Two of Eva Peace’s children die by fire. Plum burns in a
kerosene conflagration, and Hannah, her beautiful skin burned and melted, dies while Sula
watches. Eva “remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was
paralyzed, but because she was interested.” Water also proves to be an agent of death for
Chicken Little, who disappears in the river after flying from Sula’s hands while Nel watches.
The warm January thaw and the soft, water-soaked ground lead to the deaths of many Bottom
residents who follow Shadrack to the New River Road tunnel to be crushed or drowned. Some
are victims of the powerful forces that can overwhelm human beings while others watch.
Shadrack watches a little boy drown; he watches his neighbors die. Morrison has commented
that “’watch’ is something different from ’saw.’ You have to be participating in something that
you are watching. If you just saw it, you just happened to be there.” Eva, Sula, Nel, and Shadrack
all watch the destruction of others.

Morrison uses the image of a gray fur ball to symbolize Nel’s indistinct anxiety that grows into
gradual self-awareness. It begins after Sula commits adultery with Nel’s husband, Jude. It is a
gray ball hovering, “a ball of muddy strings, but without weight, fluffy but terrible in its
malevolence.” This ill-defined feeling remains with Nel for more than twenty-five years as she
struggles to know herself and understand her friendship with Sula.

Such discovery and affirmation, however, must be personal and individual, as the residents of the
Bottom also come to know. Waiting for the larger white society to provide validation through
jobs, social status, or recognition only leads to self-destruction. Scores of people who die on
Shadrack’s National Suicide Day at the site of the Bottom’s hope for a better life, the New River
Road tunnel, demonstrate the futility of social redemption. Only the personal is possible.

Summary
The Bottom is a mostly black community in Ohio, situated in the hills above the mostly white,
wealthier community of Medallion. The Bottom first became a community when a master gave it
to his former slave. This "gift" was in fact a trick: the master gave the former slave a poor stretch
of hilly land, convincing the slave the land was worthwhile by claiming that because it was hilly,
it was closer to heaven. The trick, though, led to the growth of a vibrant community. Now the
community faces a new threat; wealthy whites have taken a liking to the land, and would like to
destroy much of the town in order to build a golf course.

Shadrack, a resident of the Bottom, fought in WWI. He returns a shattered man, unable to accept
the complexities of the world; he lives on the outskirts of town, attempting to create order in his
life. One of his methods involves compartmentalizing his fear of death in a ritual he invents and
names National Suicide Day. The town is at first wary of him and his ritual, then, over time,
unthinkingly accepts him.

Meanwhile, the families of the children Nel and Sula are contrasted. Nel is the product of a
family that believes deeply in social conventions; hers is a stable home, though some might
characterize it as rigid. Nel is uncertain of the conventional life her mother, Helene, wants for
her; these doubts are hammered home when she meets Rochelle, her grandmother and a former
prostitute, the only unconventional woman in her family line. Sula's family is very different: she
lives with her grandmother, Eva, and her mother, Hannah, both of whom are seen by the town as
eccentric and loose. Their house also serves as a home for three informally adopted boys and a
steady stream of borders.

Despite their differences, Sula and Nel become fiercely attached to each other during
adolescence. However, a traumatic accident changes everything. One day, Sula playfully swings
a neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, around by his hands. When she loses her grip, the boy falls
into a nearby river and drowns. They never tell anyone about the accident even though they did
not intend to harm the boy. The two girls begin to grow apart. One day, in an accident, Sula's
mother's dress catches fire and she dies of the burns.

After high school, Nel chooses to marry and settles into the conventional role of wife and
mother. Sula follows a wildly divergent path and lives a life of fierce independence and total
disregard for social conventions. Shortly after Nel's wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom for a period
of 10 years. She has many affairs, some with white men. However, she finds people following
the same boring routines elsewhere, so she returns to the Bottom and to Nel.

Upon her return, the town regards Sula as the very personification of evil for her blatant
disregard of social conventions. Their hatred in part rests upon Sula's interracial relationships,
but is crystallized when Sula has an affair with Nel's husband, Jude, who subsequently abandons
Nel. Ironically, the community's labeling of Sula as evil actually improves their own lives. Her
presence in the community gives them the impetus to live harmoniously with one another. Nel
breaks off her friendship with Sula. Just before Sula dies in 1940, they achieve a half-hearted
reconciliation. With Sula's death, the harmony that had reigned in the town quickly dissolves.

In 1965, with the Bottom facing the prospect of the white golf course, Nel visits Eva in the
nursing home. Eva accuses her of sharing the guilt for Chicken Little's death. Her accusation
forces Nel to confront the unfairness of her judgment against Sula. Nel admits to herself that she
had blamed his death entirely on Sula and set herself up as the "good" half of the relationship.
Nel comes to realize that in the aftermath of Chicken Little's death she had too quickly clung to
social convention in an effort to define herself as "good." Nel goes to the cemetery and mourns at
Sula's grave, calling out Sula's name in sadness.

Sula is a novel about ambiguity. It questions and examines the terms "good" and "evil," often
demonstrating that the two often resemble one another. The novel addresses the confusing
mysteries of human emotions and relationships, ultimately concluding that social conventions are
inadequate as a foundation for living one's life. The novel tempts the reader to apply the
diametrically opposed terms of "good and evil," "right and wrong" to the characters and their
actions, and yet simultaneously shows why it is necessary to resist such temptation. While
exploring the ways in which people try to make meaning of lives filled with conflicts over race,
gender, and simple idiosyncratic points of views, Sula resists easy answers, demonstrating the
ambiguity, beauty, and terror of life, in both its triumphs and horrors.
Summary
The Bottom is a mostly black community in Ohio, situated in the hills above the mostly white,
wealthier community of Medallion. The Bottom first became a community when a master gave it
to his former slave. This "gift" was in fact a trick: the master gave the former slave a poor stretch
of hilly land, convincing the slave the land was worthwhile by claiming that because it was hilly,
it was closer to heaven. The trick, though, led to the growth of a vibrant community. Now the
community faces a new threat; wealthy whites have taken a liking to the land, and would like to
destroy much of the town in order to build a golf course.

Shadrack, a resident of the Bottom, fought in WWI. He returns a shattered man, unable to accept
the complexities of the world; he lives on the outskirts of town, attempting to create order in his
life. One of his methods involves compartmentalizing his fear of death in a ritual he invents and
names National Suicide Day. The town is at first wary of him and his ritual, then, over time,
unthinkingly accepts him.