Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Underdogs: In Response to Professor Hanley (Continued)

“We looked. Yes, thank heaven! it was the signal. The Demon rose like a great hawk to a considerable height, floated around for awhile in space, and then slowly descended” (Caesar’s Column, 221).

“It was a heavenly morning. It had rained all night, and the sky dawned covered with a canopy of white clouds. Young, wild colts trotted on the summit of the sierra, with streaming manes and outstretched tails, graceful as the elegant peaks that lift their heads to kiss the clouds” (The Underdogs, 149).

Auzela’s descriptive imagery is fused with beauty, physicality, appealing characters, and masculinity. The reader’s sensory perception and imagination are on overdrive. Azuela’s revolutionary imagination is one of compassion, loyalty, individual conflict, and sensuality. Comparatively, abrasive characters, acidic dialogue, and desolate towns and villages, occupied by traumatized and despairing residents, define Babel’s revolution. Similarly, Donnelly’s revolution is an illustration of corrupt power, hopelessness, and despair remedied only by an escape to his “utopian” colony. The emotional tensions and individual conflicts become physical descriptions for Malraux’s revolutionaries in Man’s Fate. Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a revolution. And Orwell’s revolution can be read as a definitive description and illustration of the modern work place.

Edith

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