Literature of the Picaresque – Writing

Yes!

It is as the old saying goes “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” I believe we are only as moral as our consequences,remove the consequences of our actions and most revert to a less evolved level,you know animals.

This is going to require some thought on my part,good one!! Not liking you right now Professor!! lol

As a clinician if I have ten sick patients who are afflicted with an unnamed pathology,two of them hate each other,one is in love with another and so on, my job as a clinician is not to examine the interpersonal interactions of my patients,it is to isolate and identify the cause of the sickness,how the afflicted interact is incidental. What causes people to commit such horrors,why does this not fascinate people as much as it fascinates myself? But I can see your point, I think it takes away from a clear a concise diagnosis however.

This is a first draft mistake, it should say we are a pale comparison to what we think we really are, the distraction is our own self-importance, we are hopelessly distracted by ourselves what else do people think about but themselves.

This is an excellent passage to draw into your argument. This is essentially where the narrator himself makes the comparison between a way of looking at the world native to to the village, and “the standards of the European industrial world.” Say more.

Try to connect this bigger picture disagreement to the narrator’s argument with the villagers. That would make for a very interesting development of your thesis.

The argument that the narrator has with Mahjoub and with the rest of the village over Hosna is one of the key disagreements in the novel. He certainly “thinks differently” than they do about the whole business. Can you connect their positions to the larger context? Does the narrator represent the “modernizing” Western social norms that the villagers and their traditional society are struggling to reject?

Agree with Adam. The difference in the treatment of women between European and Sudanese society is a major theme in the book, and deserves some more attention in general, before you get to the specifics of Hosna and Wad Rayyes story. What does Mustafa’s story suggest about European society and how they think differently there?

Excellent point. I think that comparing the narrator’s grandfather’s house with a European city is an interesting idea – something that I had not thought at all about.

Perhaps you would not need a quote describing the organizational plan of European streets, if you took some time to describe them. What I think you mean is the grid-like style of urban planning – exemplified by no city as well as New York!

Then, I think you should make the terms of the comparison explicit. The rooms of the house are slapdash, unplanned, and the house has no grid or map – it develops organically, over time. The European city, on the other hand, is all straight lines and ninety-degree angles.

The most important part of this comparison will be to show how it illustrates humans “thinking differently.” Even though we all construct dwellings, the way in which we envision and build them varies drastically between peoples and cultures – or something along those lines.

As I said, your idea of “thinking” differently seems much more specific and engaging to me as a thesis than the general idea of “minor differences.”