Commentary ? To Be a Pilgrim, Joyce Cary

Résumé du document

With man's advances made in the field of the farming of land and technical progress, nature is most of the time considered to be more and more modified, more and more domesticated by human beings. The modification of nature seems to be one of the main subjects tackled in To Be a Pilgrim, a novel written in 1942 by Joyce Cary. The excerpt whose narrative mode is the first-person narrative begins with a very subjective description of nature through feelings, comparisons and associations of ideas. Furthermore this description is linked to some of the narrator's memories and leads him to expose his point of view on the historical evolution of the link between man and nature. The narrator evokes the weight of history and clearly comes back to his personal case evoking the consequences of it on him.

Extraits

[...] The modification of nature seems to be one of the main subjects tackled in To Be a Pilgrim, a novel written in 1942 by Joyce Cary. The excerpt whose narrative mode is the first-person narrative begins with a very subjective description of nature through feelings, comparisons and associations of ideas. Furthermore this description is linked to some of the narrator's memories and leads him to expose his point of view on the historical evolution of the link between man and nature. [...]

[...] He is an imaginary character which appears in Piers Plowman, a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. Among other things, he definitely symbolises man of his time in this case.“Cobbett” evoked on line 27 was a British radical agriculturist of the beginning of XIXth century. The stake of the evokation of such characters is definitely to express the idea that the different generations who have farmed the land, who have domesticated nature began to do it centuries earlier. [...]

[...] Right from the start, nature appears as being one of the main subjects of the excerpt. The excerpt begins with a description of the atmosphere during a hot afternoon then a description of several natural elements. This description is characterised by the fact that nature is described through a biased point of view. First of all, the general atmosphere of the scene is described. The narrative mode in this text is a first-person narrative : the story is narrated by one character, who explicitly refers to him involving as indicated on line 33. [...]

[...] By the way, it evokes a general torpor reinforced by the use of words of the same lexical field such as as indicated on line 4. Besides if is not an adjective usually associated to the air, is not usually associated to a sound a as indicated on line 4. In a way the air is personified, but also as having a real substance one can touch as in the phrase came through this thickened air on line 3 ; the air is described as having a thickness, as if it was a substance, a material with a real layer one can go through. [...]

[...] Indeed Rousseau writes first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society”. Man in a state of nature finally decided to really make the most of nature and began to use it for a good reason : his subsistence in the best conditions of living he could have. J. Cary writes that the young farmer “wrote with its crooked line the history of human growth” as indicated on line 22, line designed by the hedge he planted ; effectively, he has been the first to realise that nature was something you can farm and that he symbolises the beginning of a significant progress. [...]