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ornamental line

This World of Contradictions

"The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by
personal impulses disguised into creeds" (60).
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907)

 

Points for Reflection

J. Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), chps. 3-5

  1. are the various members of Verloc's anarchist group distinctive enough in their temperament and ideas to be considered separate individuals, or are they mirror images of one another?
  2. what does the narrator himself think of the anarchists?
  3. why is Stevie so upset by Karl Yundt's use of violent imagery and metaphor?
  4. do the individual brains of Stevie and Adolph Verloc encounter similar limitations?
  5. does the ridiculous Adolf Verloc finally become sympathetic at the close of chapter three?
  6. what does the narrator mean by his suggestion that Ossipon "[suffers] from a sense of moral and even physical insignificance" when speaking with the Professor (47)?
  7. is the Professor’s ominous self-confidence a pose or an unshakeable fact?
  8. to what degree does the narrator himself shape the reader’s opinion of the Professor?  Are the narrator’s character judgments intrusive—does it bother you to be told what to think about a character?
  9. what is the Professor's endgame?
  10. why might the Professor tell Ossipon to "'[f]asten himself upon'" Winnie Verloc (59)?
  11. how does the medical scene at the center of chapter five (64-67) retroactively inform the discussions of violence in chapters three and four?  Does it make Karl Yundt’s and the Professor’s casual views on bloodshed seem appropriate, absurd, or reprehensible?

Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” (1914; 1916)

  1. does the narrator's claim that the foreign soil enriched by his body will be "richer" than that soil surrounding his grave come across as more nationalistic than xenophobic?
  2. what kind of change does the narrator imagine death bringing him in this Petrarchan sonnet's closing sestet, a change for the better or the worse?
  3. can a modern reader appreciate the ardent nationalist sentiment woven into this sonnet?


Siegfried Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” (1917)

  1. what types of war injuries do English women apparently enjoy celebrating?
  2. assume "You make us shells" is equivocal. What various meanings might this line carry?
  3. what point is Sassoon making by using "distant" in line seven?
  4. do the women that Sassoon here imagines have any sympathy for those who run from battle?
  5. why does Sassoon conclude the poem by addressing a German, not an English, mother?


Siegfried Sassoon's "'They'" (1919)

  1. the Bishop believes war brings about what type of transformation in those who fight?
  2. what array of disabling conditions have the soldiers suffered while in war?
  3. what tone controls the poem's final line?


Siegfried Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang” (April 1919)

  1. why does the celebratory tone of this poem's first eight lines not continue through to the end?


a painting in neutrals of a large river with two boats and people a castle-like structure silhouetted in the back
The Thames at Westminster (1871)
Claude Monet


Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu