Analysis Of The Age Of Anxiety Essay — страница 3

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this, Auden means that even when we are most innocent, we are still imperfect (Nelson 119). The second age is youth, as Malin describes it. It is at this age at which man realizes “his life-bet with a lying self.” Despite this, man’s naive belief in self and place in life is boundless. It is in this age that the belief in the future is possible (Nelson 119). The third age is termed by Malin as the age of sexual awakening. It is in this age that the distinction between dream and reality begins to surface in the mind of man. With this distinction comes the discovery that love, as it was thought to be, is a sharp contrast to love in the bounds of reality (Nelson 119). The fourth age presents circus imagery “as a form of art too close to life to have any purgative effect on

the audience.” It is reinforced by Rosetta’s definitions of life as an “impertinent appetitive flux,” and the world as a “clown’s cosmos” (Nelson 119). Malin conveys the image of man as “an astonished victor” in the fifth age. Man in this age feel as though he has made peace with the meaning of life. The anxiety of life declines as “He [man] learns to speak / Softer and slower, not to seem so eager.” Here, man discovers he is no longer confined in a prison of prisimatic color, but free in the dull, bland place that is the world (Nelson 119-120). Emble, being the youngest of the four, refuses to drift into the middle age of the fifth age willingly. Instead, he demands to know why man must “Leave out the worst / Pang of youth.” He is unlike the others in

that he is still young enough to have an influence on his future (Nelson 120). Quant is more dominant in this age than any other for it is this age that he represents. In it, he attempts to eliminate all hope for a future. He feels that “if man cannot adjust to mediocrity, it is too bad. . . If man asks for more, the world only gets worse” (Nelson 120). The sixth age is attributed to man’s “scars of time,” to man’s aging. “Impotent, aged, and successful,” Malin portrays man to be indifferent to the world (Nelson 120). “Hypothetical man” is exhausted when “His last illusions have lost patience / With the human enterprise” in the seventh age. Malin greets this age with preparedness, but the other characters feel reluctance in greeting death (Nelson 120). The

second act of Part II of _The Age of Anxiety_, “The Seven Stages,” is different from “The Seven Ages” in that the first act is based on experiences and the second act consists entirely of a dream. The purpose of “The Seven Stages” is to determine the ideal time of life for man in which he can reside for eternity (Nelson 121). The first stage begins like all quests begin, with all characters alone. They are each “isolated with his own thoughts.” Their journey ends in the same fashion, with each of them alone, which labels this as a false quest for nothing is accomplished (Nelson 121). The second stage is initiated by the pairing of the characters. This pairing represents the possibility of hope with the two youngest, Emble and Rosetta, and it also symbolizes the

futility of hope with the two eldest, Quant and Malin (Nelson 121). The third stage begins as the couples begin to head inland. Emble and Rosetta travel via plane, which symbolizes the useless attempt to escape life by flying above it. Quant and Malin, on the other hand, travel by train, which represents the same inability to escape life, although this time the method is through immersion into life (Nelson 121). In the fourth stage, Malin speaks for the group in his derogatory statements about the city. Malin also passes judgment on the people of the city not on the basis of personality content, but on that of the surroundings of which he thinks so lowly (Nelson 122). The fifth stage is reached when the group sights “the big house” while riding on a trolley. Rosetta, with her

false past as an outline, references the house to one in which she was imaginarily reared, and to which she shall return. During her visitation to the house, Quant and the others analyze the house’s exterior. Quant comments on the house’s appearance: “The facade has a lifeless look.” The house is compared to a human being, with its “book-lined rooms” serving as the brain and “the guards at the front gate [who] / Change with the seasons” serving as the senses. Rosetta finds her life within the house no better than before (Nelson 122). The sixth stage takes place in a “forgotten graveyard.” It is observed as a “still / Museum [exhibiting] / The results of life,” which could either be death or the life that results from death as the “Flittermice, finches /