LITERATURE ANALYSIS #3

1. I read A Passage to India by E.M. Forster.  The main character is Dr. Aziz, and the novel takes place in an India under British imperial rule.  One night, Dr. Aziz meets Mrs. Moore and likes her because she is one of the only Englishwomen he knows who is kind to him.  Her travel companion is Adela Quested, the possible fiancée of Mrs. Moore’s son, the City Magistrate who is vehemently against all Indians.  After a party requested by Adela to meet Indians, Adela instead meets Fielding, who works at the Government College.  Aziz is invited by Adela to have tea with a Hindu professor, Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and her.  Aziz and Fielding get along very well, but the gathering is interrupted by Mrs. Moore’s prejudice son.  Aziz offers the people at tea a trip through nearby caves.  Because Fielding and the professor are delayed, and Mrs. Moore becomes claustrophobic and scared of the echoes, Aziz and Adela are go through the caves together.  When Adela offends Aziz, he runs off, and when he returns, she has already driven away from the caves.  Later, he is arrested because Adela accused him of trying to rape her.  This shatters Aziz’s illusions that he could be friends with Englishmen.  In the end, Fielding defends Aziz and causes more conflict between the two races, Adela finally confesses in court that nothing happened, and Mrs. Moore dies on a trip back to England.  Fielding becomes friends with Adela because he admires her strength in court, and Aziz breaks ties with him because of it.  Years later, Aziz finds out that Fielding married Mrs. Moore’s daughter, and the two want to become friends, but Aziz says that can’t happen during that time of conflict and tension.

2. An imbalance of power in a society that consists of two different cultures, one of which considers itself superior to the other, can create a schism that can’t be bridged even if one wants to.

3. The tone is objective, but sympathetic to both sides of the culture.  “The earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which writers must pass single file.”  Through this matter of fact statement, Forster emphasizes all of the obstacles figuratively that the people of the separate cultures would need to overcome in order to connect their cultures and lifestyles.  “Fielding, for instance, had not meant that Indians are obscure, but that Post Impressionism is; a gulf divided his remark from Mrs. Turton’s ‘Why, they speak English,” but to Aziz the two sounded alike.”  This shows Forster’s sympathy that these two are trying to understand each other, but objectively put, their cultures are just too different.  “ ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ ”  This shows Forster’s sympathy for combining both cultures, even though it would be an impossible road to take.

4. Imagery – Forster uses this technique to describe the setting of the book in a way that allows the reader to picture its elegance and beauty, elegance and beauty that is now infringed upon by “Englishmen.” 

“Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue.  By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference – orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple.” (Page 8)

“League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again.  Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted.  These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves.”  (Page 9)

Personification – Forster also uses this technique to describe the setting of the novel by assigning human actions and verbs to non-human things.  “The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and in their turn hide the bazaars…Seeking light and air, and endowed with more strength than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city for the birds.”  (Page 8)

“The sky settles everything...By herself she can do little – only feeble outbursts of flowers.”  (Page 9)

Parallelism – using parallelism provides a smooth transition to different actions of trees that Forster is describing.

“They rise from the gardens where the ancient tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples.”  (Page 8)

Point of View – Forster writes A Passage to India in third person omniscient perspective, allowing the readers to know some of the thoughts and motives of some of the major characters, like Aziz and Mrs. Moore.

“Some day he too would build a mosque, smaller than this but in perfect taste, so that all who passed by should experience the happiness he felt now…he always held pathos to be profound.  The secret understanding of the heart!” (Describing Aziz’s thought process on Page 19-20)

“He had not forbidden her to think about Aziz, however, and she did this when she retired to her room.”  (Mrs. Moore’s thoughts on Page 34)

Foreshadowing – Forster prepares the reader for the rude way in which the Englishmen treat the Indians by including an argument over this between the main character, Dr. Aziz, and his friends in the beginning of the book.  A couple of pages later, Aziz was snubbed by two Englishwomen. (Page 17)

Simile – Forster uses this simile example to provide the reader with a better picture of the night sky in his description of it.  “Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault.”  (Page 9)

Repetition – Forster uses repetition to emphasize the multiple descriptions of the city from different perspectives.  “It is a city of gardens.  It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered by huts.  It is a tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble river.”  (Page 8)

Symbol – The horses symbolize that even though Fielding and Aziz want to be friends, their two cultures were against coming together like the horses in the example, “But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart,”  (Page 322)

Cultural Allusions – Throughout the book, Forster incorporates multiple words from Indian culture like “purdah,” “hookah,” and “chuprassi”

Irony – Mr. Turton throws a Bridge Party to form an invisible bridge for an evening between the two separate cultures.  However, the Bridge Party consists mainly of all of the Indians standing on one side of the tennis court in a line and all of the Englishmen standing on the other, the Englishmen not really wanting to form the “bridge.”

 Characterization

1.  Direct Characterization – “His memory was good, and for so young a man he had read largely; the themes he preferred were the decay of Islam and the brevity of Love.”  (Describing Dr. Aziz on Page 15) and “Rather small, with a little moustache and quick eyes.” (Mrs. Moore describing Dr. Aziz on Page 30)

Indirect Characterization – “ ‘If Dr. Aziz never did it he ought to be let out.’ ” (Adela says on Page 203) and “ ‘She was certainly intending to be kind, but I did not find her exactly charming.’ ”  (Describing Mrs. Callendar on Page 22)

Forster uses the first example of indirect characterization to increase the conflict between the Englishmen and the Indian culture because she is an Englishwoman, and the Englishmen in India weren’t supposed to sympathize with the Indians, like she is doing in the quote.  Forster also includes direct characterization because most of the accounts of Aziz by Englishmen are biased by their intense dislike for and demeaning attitude towards all Indians.

2.  Yes, diction changes because when Aziz is with his Indian friends in the beginning, he openly jokes around with them about death or all the food being eaten, but when he is with his English friend Fielding, they are more formal and their conversations can be somewhat strained because of a society that doesn’t encourage the melding of the two cultures and lifestyles.

3.  Aziz, the protagonist, is round and dynamic.  At the beginning he really believes that he can be friends with Englishmen if they accept his kindness, but then, when Adela falsely accused him of the crime, he became disillusioned and realized in the end that there isn’t a way for him to be friends with Fielding, an Englishmen.  He is round because the reader is allowed to witness the similarities and differences in his interactions with Indians, his thoughts when he is observing the world alone, and his conversations with Englishmen.

4.  I feel like I met a character in Dr. Aziz.  A third person omniscient perspective allowed me access to his thoughts, and being inside someone’s head like that lets you connect to them, even if it is only a character in the book.  It let me know what his interests were as well as what or who he detested. “The contest between this dualism and the contention of shadows within pleased Aziz.”  (Page 19)