Herein lies the
message of the strange villain Dimitri in Coetzee’s “Schooldays”: He is the
person paralyzed by guilt, something that is at the core, and he knows it; that
it can’t be fobbed off on his sad, lonely childhood, that it (the feeling of
being unloved by your own flesh and blood) is not the driver of Dimitri’s
tragedy, when in a fit of madness (unhinged passion, because, what, pray tell,
do we REALLY know about what the human heart is capable of doing, both in grace
and evil) he strangles his one true love who has miraculously come to him.
Technique to
study: Simon, the narrator, the everyman, without him we don’t live as fully
the extremes of the other characters, who like electrons swirl around,
bombarded by stimuli, and we, the readers, are the neutron, the neutral being. Simon
is simple, ordinary. We are moved to feeling for him, of course. Someone we can
relate to; and perhaps more important, feel superior to. (The mass appeal
message of the performance show that with The Simpsons made Fox TV what it is
today: American Idol.)
Next: Running for Your Life: Street Book Pathway
0 comments:
Post a Comment