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Transcript

A Passage to India

A Polyphonic Novel

Cyril Fielding

we identify Fielding with Forster, as many readers do (and partly correctly), the novel is about friendship and the difficulty of leading a life by liberal principles Fielding, in terms of this reading, is the hero.

Dr Aziz

Aziz moves from the naïve good-natured

innocent who is eager to please to a

more rigidly Indian nationalist perspective

Adela Quested

allegorises her growth in personal honesty and personal truth - she moves from a shallow desire to "see India" towards a more truthful sense of self, of sexual and psychological honesty, than she had previously possessed

Mrs Moore

confronts something in the Marabar Caves, an emptiness and hollowness which undermines her form of Christian idealism, which makes the novel particularly enigmatic. What is in the caves, if anything, challenges all Mrs Moore's idealistic belief in the intrinsic friendliness of Nature and of the Universe - she realises, possibly, that Nature is, at best, indifferent, and possibly hostile

Structure

tripartite structure modelling the 3 Indian seasons

structured by the quest for India itself

ever-shifting and panoramic view of an 'India' which cannot grasped

References to mystery/muddle that is India are frequent

various visions, but India remains

Questions:

How does the polyphonic take on the novel affect its reading?

Aziz moves from the naïve good-natured innocent who is eager to please to a more rigidly Indian nationalist perspective

Forster uses Mrs Moore's point of view as a means of exploring fundamental issues about Good and Evil, about Truth and Reality. Certainly the novel permits this reading, a reading of the "shadow side" of Christian humanism and of the basic tenets of Western civilisation, and a prophetic anticipation of the spirit which would lead to Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

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