Barnet in his book Literature for Composition: Essays, Fiction, Poetry and Drama Barnet, 1988:712 explain the way to understand the characteristic
through: a. What the character says
How the character says will help the readers interpret his or her characteristic. b. What the character does
The readers or audience can learn the attitudes or behaviors of a character and they may guess how actually the author creates the characters.
c. What the other characters says about the character A character interacts with other characters. They share their opinion and gives
comments about the character. Such opinion and comments may reflect the characteristic of the character drawn.
Based on the way of author’s characterization, the reader or the audience can know the characters by looking at the behavior of the characters or others who
tells what the character is like. The author may present the characters by showing character’s action, or describe the characters by telling what they are like.
Here the writer will use both these thories of characterization to analyze the novel.
2. Theory of Modernity
According to Arvanitakis’s article understanding modernity there are some dimensions of modernity, they are important to understand because
modernity transformed both the structure and relationships of the world. Modernity
focuses on
the forces
that shape
life
http:jamesarvanitakis2007.blogspot.com200903understanding-modernity. html.
These are some dimensions of modernity are as follows: 1.
Rationality The importatnt characteristic of modernity is that society should be organized
under rational lines rather than according to tradition. Societies used to organise themselves according to tradition.
2. The belief in progress
Under the conditions of modernity, human beings and societies are believed to be evolving or progressing to a better state, which can deal with injustice, poverty
and inequality. 3.
The rise of the individual and freedom It is the rise of individual and individualism, a move from traditional to modern
life was the idea that you as an individual could make a choice. 4.
Self expression and identity The move from traditional societies to modern ones was also supposed to allow us
the ability to for our own identities and express these the way we wanted to. 5.
Control In modern societies, we are meant to conrtol over our lives, but the issues is we
cannot have too much choice because this threathens the stability of society. So choices exists but it is within boundaries.
6. The private sphere
The gap between the public and private sphere. In modern societies we separate what is public and what is private though this is a division that keeps on moving.
7. Postcolonialism
In his anthology Postcolonial Discourses, Gregory Castle signifies the diversity of perspectives within the thematic approaches of Postcolonialism itself.
He explains the Postcolonialism studies vary in its subject –matter, whether it is a
political movement, a social condition, a literary text, or concepts like gender, nationalism, textuality and postmodernism Castle, 2001:xi.
Charles E. Bressler in Literary Criticism: An Introduction to theory and Practice also gives his crucial note on the heterogenousity of Postcolonial field of
study Bressler, 1999: 266. Likewise, Postcolonialism deals with many issues for societies that have undergone colonialism: the dilemmas of developing a national
identity in the wake of colonial rule: the ways in which writers from colonial countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities and
reclaim them from the colonizers; the way knowledge of subordinate people is produced and used; and the ways in which the literature of colonial powers is used
to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonized as inferior.
In his book Colonization: A Global History, Marc Ferro analyzes Jacques Berque’s statement, which claims that colonization was an enterprise which had
subverted the nature of other cultures. It seized the nature of the other in order to
