How To Read Literature Like A Professor - Plot & Excerpts
Its narrator is more fallible, more consistently clueless, than any narrator you’re ever likely to meet in all of fiction; at the same time he’s completely believable and therefore pathetic. He is part of a pair of couples who meet every year at a European spa. During all these years, and quite unbeknownst to him, his wife, Florence, and the husband of the other couple, Edward Ashburnham, carry on a passionate affair. It gets better: Edward’s wife, Leonora, knows all about it, and in fact may have stage-managed its beginning to keep the chronically straying Edward out of a more disastrous relationship. The success of this strategy must be questioned, since the relationship eventually manages to destroy, by my count, six lives. Only poor cuckolded old John Dowell remains ignorant. Consider the possibilities for irony. For an English professor, and for any avid reader, having a blithely ignorant (and only recently clued-in) husband narrate the saga of his wife’s longtime infidelity is about as good as it gets.
What do You think about How To Read Literature Like A Professor?
