Edgar Lawrence Doctorow's Lives of the Poets, (A Collection of Six Short Stories and a Novella) Embodiments of Good and Evil with Two-Dimensional Characters and Situations

The 1984 collection of six stories and a novella, Lives of the Poets, varies widely in quality as well as in the amount of autobiography Doctorow has put into the pieces. Although the short stories in Lives of the Poets have nothing similar in common in their plots, they are all linked to one another in some ways. The first and the last stories, The Writer in the Family , and Lives of the Poets are related in a way that they are considered as personal life and career of a boy named Jonathan. The Writer in the Family is about a fifteen-year-old boy who is forced by his aunt to write letters to his grandmother pretending his broken dead father is safe and prosperous in Arizona. In the last story of this collection, the reader finds out more about Jonathan who is now a fifty-year-old author. The other stories including The Water Works , Willi , The Hunter , The Foreign Legation , and The Leather Man could be studied from different aspects. As many Doctorow's characters go through a symbolic journey towards maturity and self-awareness, something paradoxical happens inside each of the stories. This article tries to reveal those paradoxical or ambiguous points in characters' personalities or at least in the existing situations of the stories. Doctorow in this collection creates an elemental parable of good and evil, sometimes he gratuitously, includes sex and violence. While analyzing each of the stories, the article tries to reveal that the whole collection is an embodiment of good and evil, by creating a growing accumulation of two-dimensional characters, Doctorow simplifies human actions.

کلیدواژه ها:

Autobiography ، E. L. Doctorow ، Embodiments ، Parable of Good and Evil ، Paradox ، Two- Dimensional Characters