Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

British Literature Since 1798: The Resolve to Change, Changing despite…

- - - - South London and its inhabitants, although rapidly changed during the 60s and 70s, stayed stagnant through racial equality and economic prowess for the working class
        
        Both have protagonists that want to change, to become better than they were in their youth or to become fulfilled in their lives, but hit roadblocks that, honestly, they aren't driven enough to overcome- in a way, they are "all talk, no action"
        
        Karim, throughout the novel, sees how life affects people like his father and Charlie and acts as if he is "above" how they are. Haroon, his father, turns into some kind of spiritual guru that Karim believes is his way of trying to find purpose, while Charlie, his friend and former love interest, becomes a poseur-esque "rocker" who ignores the fundamentals of rock (antiestablishmentarianism and anti-capitalism) and trades it in for drugs and odd sex. Despite knowing that the people in his life are lost in a way and thinking that he can find his own way, he sells out just the same as Charlie by signing on to play a racist caricature of an Indian person on a soap opera
        
        Leah and "Natalie" are completely stagnant in their lives:
        
        Leah forces herself to stay stagnant as a way of trying to keep the life she wants for herself at the detriment of Michel's expectations while wanting to become the master of her own fate
        
        "Natalie" or Keisha, mimics the lives of those who are deemed "better" than her working-class Jamaican family, eventually taking a new name, marrying a wealthy man, and becoming a barrister, but is unsatisfied in all of her relationships as she spent all of her time making her life look better, rather than actually be better
      - North-West London/Caldwell as a working-class council estate combined with the culture of constant "self-improvement" regardless of satisfaction seems to halt genuine progress
- - - - For the character of Gradgrind to undergo change in "Hard Times", it's not because Coketown is a progressive safe haven. It takes Gradgrind seeing Bounderby as he truly is, a lying, scheming businessman who gets working-class and poverty-stricken folks to work in factories under the guise that, one day, they will reach success, for him to realize that fact-based thinking and its forced implimentation is detrimental to the happiness of others
      - Kerans in "The Drowned World undergoes a sort of primitive change; he spends most of the novel trying to find a way to reverse the Earth's flooding, but after seeing the deflooded London and expressing horror and disgust, he realizes that what must happen is evolution. He is able to accept the Earth as it is and move forward, "a second Adam searching for the forgotton paradises of the reborn sun"