Butler's main purpose in his posthumous novel "The Way of All Flesh" is to make an ironic and sharp satire on the typical victorian family though, at the same time, it cannot be considered as a complete demystification of marriage from a social point of view. Both rebellion and self-imposed respect for patriarchal education are evidence of the protagonist's inability to escape his parents' influence. Moreover, Butler's talent for paradox and conceptual reversals sets the ground for a complex narrative structure, able to expose the main unsolved contradictions in the late nineteenth century. In this essay I discuss on the one hand the challenges posed by the shifting narrator, and on the other hand the protagonist's ambiguous reaction to social and religious values.
Climbing Down a Family Tree: Rejected Fathers in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
D'AGNONE, Luigi
2014-01-01
Abstract
Butler's main purpose in his posthumous novel "The Way of All Flesh" is to make an ironic and sharp satire on the typical victorian family though, at the same time, it cannot be considered as a complete demystification of marriage from a social point of view. Both rebellion and self-imposed respect for patriarchal education are evidence of the protagonist's inability to escape his parents' influence. Moreover, Butler's talent for paradox and conceptual reversals sets the ground for a complex narrative structure, able to expose the main unsolved contradictions in the late nineteenth century. In this essay I discuss on the one hand the challenges posed by the shifting narrator, and on the other hand the protagonist's ambiguous reaction to social and religious values.
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