Upward mobility Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Upward mobility - Essay ExampleThis third time-level represents one facet of several doable comparisons between the storyteller and Saeed, in all urged by the construction of the novel around this pair of characters.At the very first base of the novel, the narrator refers to his time in England as seven years of longing and describes the place as a land whose fishes die of the cold. The narrators characterizations of his studies abroad are typically vague and completely lacking in occurrence (as in the preceding example) or dismissive. The narrative of Mustafa Saeeds experiences as a student, intellectual and Sudanese expatriate in England. This time-level first appears relatively late in comparison with the other time-levels, (Tayeb , 183)After offering this optimistic cross-cultural comparison, the narrator notes the ominously silent Mustafa Saeed, who verbalise nothing. Saeeds silence parallels the narrators own reticence to share all his thoughts with the villagers, a retice nce which possibly reflects deeper misgivings about the truth of his upbeat observation. The narrator thinks to himself that in England, just as in the Sudan.Some are strong and some arc weak that some have been given over more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrow and most of the weak are no longer weak.This comparison begs the hesitancy, however, of whether the same can be said of the relationship between England and the Sudan, rather than within both England and the Sudan.30 For Saeed, as both we and the narrator learn in subsequent chapters, a chasm separates East/South from North/West, a gulf reflecting powerlessness and power, respectively, in rejoinder to which he embarks on his personal program of violent revenge.Even before Saeeds story is begun, however, Saeed questions the relevance of the narrators experiences abroad. Saeed introduces himself to the narrator and remarks, in a vaguely dismissive manner, o n the latters achievements. (Tayeb , 183) Solid and unproblematic values, the humanistic act of perusing another cultures literature, and the virtue of humility, all appear in conjunction with the narrators experiences in Europe. Yet the dissimulation calls into question the values implicit in the narrators very general description of his experiences abroad. Saeed responds by attacking the narrators choice of display case We have no need of poetry here. Saeeds blunt criticism reflects the unviability of the naive model offered by the narrator for a possible relationship between England and the Sudan. The eager Sudanese student assiduously applying himself to the encyclopaedism of the higher (in both senses) European literary culture offers, for Saeed, a pathetic reflex of the rapaciousness of European Orientalism (including philology) a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.Even though it is Mustafa Saeed who is speaking, the narrators own experiences in an idealize England populated by poets, humanists, and doctoral candidates render English poetry intelligible to him. Ironically, precisely those idealized experiences brook him to perceive Mustafa Saeed as an interloper in the otherwise (also highly idealized) cultural homogeneity and simplicity of the village.The narrators