m (→External links) |
|||
| Linha 36: | Linha 36: | ||
Dickens, in fact, had very elaborate chapter plans for Our Mutual Friend. He had to produce exactly 32 pages of printed text each month. And he had worked out in advance what would go in each monthly "number" (issue) of the book. In the postscript to the novel, he offered some insight into how readers would put together a complicated plot that unwinds over an extended time period. |
Dickens, in fact, had very elaborate chapter plans for Our Mutual Friend. He had to produce exactly 32 pages of printed text each month. And he had worked out in advance what would go in each monthly "number" (issue) of the book. In the postscript to the novel, he offered some insight into how readers would put together a complicated plot that unwinds over an extended time period. |
||
| + | |||
| − | ==Theories== |
||
| − | *The story of [[Desmond]] will closely follow that of the main character in ''Our Mutual Friend''; therefore, [[Penelope]] is the main character's love and [[Charles Widmore]] is the business tycoon. The story is slightly different in that Penelope is the one forced by her father (Charles Widmore) to marry a certain person, rather than Desmond, and Desmond is the one who is offered the money. Desmond's disappearance while sailing in the race and getting shipwrecked on the island, however, parallels the character in ''Our Mutual Friend'' being believed dead. When Desmond leaves the island, he will return home, win back Penelope, and regain his identity. |
||
| − | *Desmond is a sort of ''Mutual Friend'' as in he met both [[Jack]] and [[Libby]] prior to the crash. |
||
| − | *A sort of anti-Oedipus. Both stories together meld overtones about fate, [[good people]] versus bad people, etc. |
||
| − | *The fact that the book was returned to Desmond upon his release suggests that he was in possession of the book at the time of his crime or subsequent arrest. Therefore the book may reappear in an upcoming episode's flashback revealing that crime, and it may represent yet another occasion on which he had been tempted to read the book. Penny's insertion of the note may also appear in a flashback. |
||
| − | *Desmond isn't dead, because he hasn't read ''Our Mutual Friend'' yet. |
||
| − | **The prison guard put it best when he said that's nice, if you know when you're gonna die. |
||
| − | *Why did Desmond leave the book in the Swan when he left? |
||
==See also== |
==See also== |
||
Revisão das 15h45min de 15 de novembro de 2006
|
Este artigo precisa ser traduzido. Este artigo ou algumas de suas partes encontram-se em outro idioma - ajude a LOSTpédia traduzindo-o.
|
|
Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend is the last completed novel written by Charles Dickens. The book is largely believed to be the most challenging that Dickens produced and is known for the seemingly rushed ending.
The novel is about the son of a tycoon who must marry a specific woman to inherit his father's fortune. He shuns this, leaves, and is presumed drowned which is untrue. He returns under a new identity, gets hired at a company related to his father, marries the same woman on his own merit, not on his father's riches, and only afterwards, assumes his original identity and inherits his fortune.
In Lost
In the season two finale "Live Together, Die Alone", it is revealed that Desmond carries with him a hardback Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend that is bound closed with rubber bands, intended only to be opened and read at last before he dies. Presumably knowing the significance of the book to him, Penelope placed a letter of her love and undying devotion in the book, intending Desmond to read it in his deepest moments of despair while incarcerated in military prison. However, he never found the letter there, as he had checked the book into prison storage with the rest of his personal inventory, and it was therefore not returned until his release. In The Swan, he finally found and read her letter when he opened the book to read it because he was contemplating suicide after years living in the hatch. It is revealed that this moment occured at the same time as when John Locke was also in despair and pounding on the hatch door at the end of season one episode "Deus Ex Machina". The combination of the letter's discovery and Locke's appearance apparently saved his life as he rejected suicide.
Desmond also hid the key to activate the fail-safe in this book. In season two episode "Orientation", when the Computer was damaged, he also searched the book before finally the computer could be fixed.
Desmond's hardbound copy of Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend, like LOST, has a deep suggestiveness--a sense that something more is going on than meets the eye. But, like LOST, it is also a kind of “shaggy dog” story, in that it raises more imaginative possibilities than it fulfills.
Scavenging
Our Mutual Friend opens with a description of Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, who are scavenging the Thames for drowned bodies. Hexam takes the valuables off the bodies before towing them to shore. Scavenging is everywhere in LOST, of course, but there is a very specific parallel to “Whatever the Case May Be", where Sawyer takes the wallet off the dead man he and Kate find in the water, or “Born to Run", where Kate accuses Sawyer of robbing dead people. Hexam justifies his action by asking “Has a dead man any use for money?” Similarly, Sawyer explains that the dead don't need money. (In a further act of “scavenging,” Kate and Jack dig up the marshall again to go through his wallet for the key.)
Fathers and Daughters
Almost every relationship of any importance (except for the two “love affairs”: John Harmond, aka “our mutual friend,” and Bella Wilfer; Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam) revolves around fathers and daughters. The novel opens with Hexam, the scavenger, and his daughter, Lizzie. After her father dies, Mirah (a saintly Jewish character whom Dickens seems to have created to refute charges of anti-Semitism leveled against him in relation to Oliver Twist) becomes a second father to Lizzie. Hexam’s nemesis is a man named Rogue Riderhood whose only relation is a daughter, Pleasant Riderhood. Bella Wilfer (the woman Harmond is supposed to marry) loves only her father (she intensely dislikes her mother and sister) until she meets Harmon and the Boffins. Mr. Boffin who sort of adopts Bella becomes a second father. Lizzie befriends a young girl named Jenny Wren (real name Fanny Cleaver, also referred to as “the Doll’s Dressmaker”) who is the sole support of her alcoholic father (who she calls her “Bad Child”). John Harmon’s father has disowned both his children: Harmon’s sister (who is now dead) and perhaps Harmon himself. (Whether this is true or not is not clear, as there are several versions of his will in play.) Georgiana Podsnap is also manipulated by her father. Fathers and daughters also abound in LOST: Kate, Sun, Shannon, Claire, Penny; all of them have similarly troubled father/daughter relationships. In fact, mothers are, for the most part, strangely absent or relatively unimportant in both Our Mutual Friend and LOST.
Mutuality
The title of Our Mutual Friend refers to John Harmond who shows up independently in two sub-plots. At some point, two men meet and realize that they both know the same person; one refers to him as “our mutual friend.” Dickens powerfully suggests in the novel the interconnectedness of people (and narratives). Some readers have argued that this is Dickens’ critique of the rigid class structure that defined English society in the 19C; others suggest that this theme of connection and mutuality is influenced by Darwin. This “mutuality,” the myriad connections and relations of the novel, seem very much a LOST trope: we similarly see people from one plot reappear in someone else’s story. How significant these mutual friends are remains to be seen.
Garbage
The plot of Our Mutual Friend revolves around several mysterious garbage heaps, called dust mounds, that were the source of John Harmon’s father’s fortune. Who inherits these mounds is a major plot concern. (There are several wills floating around, one of which is actually buried in a dust mound.) The mounds are eventually demolished. But we never learn exactly what they were made of. (One critic, Humphrey House, speculated that human excrement was part of them.) These mounds, like the LOST fuselage and all the trash that the crash generated and that litters the beach, are both mysterious and frightening.
Narrative structure
Henry James called the Victorian novel a “loose baggy monster.” Our Mutual Friend fills the bill. It is as loose and baggy as anything Dickens wrote. (He seems to have run out of steam somewhere in the second half.) We still don’t know if LOST is also going to be loose and baggy or whether in the end it will be a coherent “well-wrought urn” with all the questions answered and loose ends tidied up. Also, it’s interesting to note that Dickens published Our Mutual Friend serially—writing under time pressure (he was uncharacteristically close to deadlines with this novel). Similarly, of course, LOST is written and produced serially, with an audience hungry for more.
Inspiration
Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse mentioned in a NY Times article that they got the idea of using this book from an interview of writer John Irving. Irving had stated that he wanted Our Mutual Friend to be the the last book he reads before dying.
Lindelof and Cuse also felt they could personally relate to what Charles Dickens went through as a writer. As Cuse said: "He was writing chapter by chapter for newspapers. We often think: 'How much did Dickens know when he was writing his stories? How much of it was planned out, and how much was flying by the seat of his pants because he had to get another chapter in? We can respect what he went through."
Dickens, in fact, had very elaborate chapter plans for Our Mutual Friend. He had to produce exactly 32 pages of printed text each month. And he had worked out in advance what would go in each monthly "number" (issue) of the book. In the postscript to the novel, he offered some insight into how readers would put together a complicated plot that unwinds over an extended time period.
See also
- Aparições em Trabalhos Literários
- Carta da Penelope