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Relationship between individual and society In my essay I would like to examine the relationship between individual and society as reflected in "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" by Harlan Ellison and "Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Harlan Ellison work "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" is about a criminal or outcast living in a thoroughly regulated society, where time is calculated and supervised by the Ticktockman. The story takes place in 2389, in a world where all the people are closely connected to the time and the most dreadful fear for them is to be late. In this fantastic world being late means more than a small trouble - it is the most serious felony.
And this felony is connected with an awful punishment. The penalty for being late is a proportional amount of time taken from the life of the infringer. That means if one is five minutes late the term of his living becomes five minutes shorter. And if one is a kind of person who is usually sluggish, you are doomed to have a special message from the Master Timekeeper (the Ticktockman) telling you that your time is over you will be "turned off. " Time is not a conceptual rule; it is a real, unkind master, and it must be completely obeyed.
In this world of people who are afraid of too many things there is an insurgent. His name is Everett C. Marm, but he is known as the Harlequin. The Harlequin is a practical wag, a joker with red hair.
Ticktockman tries to catch him and finally he succeeded, but that did not bring him too much. My soul would be an outlaw - that the authors verdict. People like Harlequin will always exist. The lives of people were boring, uninteresting, and ramshackle.
People need something interesting, active, pranks and touchy and vehement and good, they need a harlequin! And he appears a little humorous jester who does his best to add some fun in this over- accurate world. Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman has high scientific value, it is not only a fairytale. The author wants us to understand that in our modern world - and not only in our modern but definitely in the past and expected in the future - there are so many foolish regulations and so many disagreeable bureaucracies that lead us into the trap under the mask of gradual thinking People dont like to be constrained by their nature. All of them behave differently: some endure the strict conditions and others begin to strike.
However, in this particular story we see only one striker - Harlequin, who is an embodiment of all the fighters with the prejudices, while Ticktockman is an embodiment of the puritans, who would rather die and kill other than recede from their foolish, stupid, irritating, but existing prevalent rules, which sooner spoil the life of the people than improve it. Some rules and prejudices prevent the people and society from the development. This is perfectly shown in the next work to discuss: "Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne Puritan dogma taught that all the people are completely nefarious and need stable introspection to see that they are reprobates, sinners and do not deserve God's Grace. As men had violated the agreement when Adam had eaten an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, God proposed a new agreement to Abraham's people in that the opportunity to appear in Heavens again must be deserved. Adherents of the Puritan religion obediently realized the negative moments of their existence rather than the positive.
This shadow of suspicion would have a straight effect on early American New England and on many of its writers, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of them. The effect of Puritan religion, background and instructions place n important role in Nathaniel Hawthorne's works. The author also wrote much about his native town Salem, Massachusetts. In his work "Young Goodman Brown" the writer analyses and gives the commentary about Salem's society of his own time also the Salem's society of his ancestors. Hawthorne himself could not avoid the effect of Puritan society, not only because of living in his father's religious Puritan family but also because of learning of his own family history. The first of his forefathers, William Hawthorne, is portrayed in Hawthorne's "The Custom House" as coming with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 "with his Bible and his sword" (Hawthorne 26).
John Hawthorne was the writers most puritanical ancestor, who embodied the level of ardor in Puritanism with his working as pursuer in the Salem Witch Trials. The deep study of his own family traditions from the organization of the Bay Colony to the Second Great Awakening found the reflection in his "Young Goodman Brown. " Studying the history his own town and particularly Puritan society Hawthorne could evaluate the value and cost of such ardor, particularly the ardor of the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, John Cottons Puritan Catechism, and the reflection of The Salem Witch trials. Hawthorne puts Young Goodman Brown into a frame of Puritan steadfastness and doubts to let his readers to see the results of such prejudices. In Young Goodman Brown we see the authors own beliefs. Puritans thought that the mistake of Adam was the heritage of the mankind, and that atonement can be received only with the help of Christ. Hawthorne wanted people to see that the fall was by human invention that "damnation is not inherited but chosen and is redeemable through human agency" (Ziff 140).
He believed that men bear a fraternity of fault. "If guilt itself was escap able, brotherhood with the guilty was not" (Ziff 142). This idea of Hawthorne is the central moment of this work. Having refused the idea that the society is an association of both good and bad, Goodman Brown has his own condemnation. In the forest Brown meet both religious and dissipated people, and it was oddly to notice that "the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints" (Hawthorne 2135).
Brown preferred to see only evil so deliverance became unreachable for him when he preferred to be along and isolated to "shrink from his Faith" and fellow man. In Hawthorne's work we can often meet the term stern. He called Puritan life so. Hawthorne knew about of the continuous straining and fight between the flesh and the soul happening in the inner world of Puritans in 17 th Century. The aim of their belief was to get a sacred victory after their death. Ennui, dissoluteness and desire were the three enemies of religion.
But this fight usually led to hopelessness, despondency. People were all the time in pain because of the persuasion and punishments they received from each other all the time. Hawthorne became interested in this fight and he was looking for it in Puritan literature. He found interesting the works such as Cotton Mothers Magnolia. It contained the morbid intensity with which he projected distinctive features of the Puritan imagination of reality. Mother was sure that in this world there were a lot of ominous spirits: these unlovely demons were everywhere, in the sunshine as well as in the darkness, and that they were hidden in mens hearts and stole into their most secret thoughts (Abel 133).
Those spirits tormented the Puritan, always repeating about his sin and the fight inside of his own soul. Hawthorne also applied the existence of this demon in his Young Goodman Brown by showing, on the example of Brown, the Puritan way to Justification. Brown is a naive young man who accepts both society in general and his fellow men as individuals at their own valuation, [who] is in one terrible night confronted with the vision of human evil... (Hawthorne 15). In the Journey towards Justification a man looses his self. Instead of it he got knowledge about corruptness, powerlessness and the delusion of sin. This knowledge would help the self-righteous man to care much care about material world or other people, but top his creed only upon God.
Having the aim to become a good product of Justification, Brown got to know about his corruptness and instead of feeling the nirvana of his dream, he was shocked having seen the real sins and choose a life of dismal isolation. Like Ellison Hawthorne shows an insurgent. However, his insurgent is not a jester, he is the one who suddenly saw the truth and his method of fighting is quite different. He simply disowned this society with all its rules.
Brown is passive, while Hawthorne's hero is active. People cant be optimally satisfied with the conditions they live in. they are always in struggle with the society: some of them are in inner struggle, like Brown, others hold the open fight and sometimes win. In our modern highly developed society, where there are so less prejudices left, one can also see many struggles and it is nice, because only through the struggle people come to changes for better. Bibliography: 1. Ziff, Larger.
Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America New York: Viking Press, 1981. 2. Fogle, Richard Harter Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and The Dark Non: U of Oklahoma P, 1970. 3. Stephen, Adams The Heroic and Mock-Heroic in Harlan Ellison's Harlequin. " Extrapolation, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1985 4. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown. " The Heath Anthology of American. Ed. Paul Later et al. 2 nd ed.
Vol. 1. Lexington: Heath, 1944. 5. Abel, Darrel. The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne's Fiction Indiana: Purdue UP, 1988.
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Research essay sample on Relationship Between Individual And Society
