Saadat HassanManto, (1912-1955) is the short story writer of the twentieth century in the language of Urdu. He was a very controversial writer of his times, who faced many court trials because of his so called ‘sex oriented’ expressions. But the fact is that Manto analysed the deep feelings of common men and women and characterized them with most sincere frankness in his writings. In many of his stories, Manto depicted woman as the main character. He brought to the reader how a woman is exploited and used by men for their individual satisfaction. In his stories Manto gives a higher status to certain values and concepts that may roughly be called his vision of life. These values and concepts include- frankness, honesty, the discrepancy between appearance and reality, the validity of sex in life, the ethics of human relations, and the ambiguous nature of reality. The humanity that shines through in his writings is a hallmark of his fictional art and his sympathy with the downtrodden living on the fringes of society is an integral part of his vision.
This essay makes a critical study of the characters found in ‘Insult’ and ‘Mummy’ with the intent of showing how Manto’s stories represents marginality and the notions of morality.
Keywords: societal hypocrisy, sexual exploitation, psychological trauma, quest for identity and human dignity.
INTRODUCTION
Saadat Hassan Manto, belongs to the literary tradition not only of Urdu fiction, but of Hindi, Punjabi and Sindhi as
The marginal case argument states that the mentally impaired and human infants have moral status than so should animals because there is not much difference in their ability to be rational. Moral status refers to the right to not be killed and tortured. This argument also promotes not only infant humans and the mentally impaired to be moral patients but animals as well. As moral patients have moral status without the need to have rationality.
Underground Men’s Eloquence and Ellipses The stream-of-consciousness modernist novel is incomplete without ellipses. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, they are a marker of the nameless protagonist’s immense interiority; yet in Wright’s rewriting of the novel, they are a sign of the protagonist’s failure to communicate with those aboveground. From this distinction, Wright diverges from existentialism to a discourse on the condition of the marginalised.
Monster Culture (Seven Theses) is a theoretical work written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen that explores this idea of monstrosity. A “monster” is an ever-present being that stands for nonconformity and elimination of social constructs. People who hold narrow viewpoints and prejudices deem a “monster” monstrous. Binti and Binti: Home highlights the reality of racism, the fear of the “other,” and the merging of
The Ugliness of Humanity There are always two opposite sides of spirits in every human, the bright side and the dark side. People can be sacred that they would like to sacrifice themselves for the others while some are ugly that they do everything only for their own benefits. The contrasts between two stories – “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel García Márquez – can definitely present the dark side of human in the world. Villagers in two myths had different responses to the magical, weird objects they met. However, these responses are based on the first impression of the magical things.
Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere”. There is so much bad form and enduring, shouting out for attention victims of yearning, of racism and political abuse in Chile, for occasion, or in the occasion journalists and artists, prisoners in such a large number of terrains administered by the left and by the
Flannery O’Connor uses style, tone, and character to tell the story of a family and a band of misfits as they struggle with good over evil in the Southern Gothic short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). The style and tone of the characters are depicted in a way that makes it difficult to feel compassion or sympathy for them. The figurative language and style used by the author depicts characters with casual, informal, and extreme Southern stereotypes, diction and attitudes. The tone of the story is ironic in regard to both the characters and plot. O’Connor uses colorful language to describe the characters of the story in a way that allows the reader to vividly see the characters as cartoon like, grotesque, and exaggerated.
Hosseini portrays how this treatment of women was accepted in Afghani culture because men’s superiority was derived from tradition. He depicts a culture in Afghanistan where wives were seen as mere possessions, so their husbands found fault with them for the inconveniences they experienced. Hosseini demonstrates the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan through the multiple examples he provides where men laid blame with women for circumstances beyond the women’s control or for which were not solely to blame for, just as Nana had warned Mariam that they were prone to do. The first instance in which Nana’s statement rings true is when Nana found out for herself how easily women in Afghanistan could be held completely accountable for things that were not solely their responsibility.
Everyday people are judging and being judged by others with unique criteria that we, as inhabitants of Earth deem necessary checkmarks to be met to afford and be afforded tokens of civility. In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Myth of the Latin Woman” the memoir is brimming with personal accounts of fetishiztation and discrimination the author experiences as a Latin woman that have vast influence on her life. Throughout the text Cofer conveys the significance of how deep the status “exotic” to describe Latina women is held inside the minds of people which the author alludes to on page 879, “I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early,” [1] after being given a sudden, non-consensual kiss at a dance by her date. The author expresses the cultural dissonance between
The short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is revolved around many distortions that the author O’Connor creates to build meaning within the story. The novel presents characters that are characterized through many different symbols that result in an uncanny feeling for the reader. O’Connor’s “place” is the distortion in the story that causes conflict, creating the uncanny feeling in the story. O’Connor’s “place” also represents a different variety of symbols, creating the necessary meaning of the psychological realism. O’Connor utilizes distortion to create meaning in the story within her characters who represent the conflicts within the Catholic Church and dramatizes it with a complicated sense of humor.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel ,Child of God, is the tale of a violent, dispossessed man living on the outskirts of society. Set in 1960s rural Tennessee, the novel focuses on the life of Lester Ballard, a murdering necrophiliac who seemingly only follows his own rules. Ballard is represented as a despicable, unhuman character, who apparently is, “A child of God much like yourself perhaps” (4). While Ballard repeatedly commits evil acts, one cannot help but find a soft spot for this man who was unloved as child and seems to be a product of his cruel environment. On the surface, Ballard’s actions make him seem alien to “us” (society) but to delve deeper, one discovers a true understanding of Lester Ballard.
The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg lets us understand the life and times of a miller, from the rural mountain town of Montereale, made to stand trial for his views on God and religion. In this story, we are able to see how the life of a commoner does not need to be shown in statistics. Through the lens of Menocchio’s trial documents we have the ability to see how one man saw the world and how he interacted with others in his small town. Through his interactions with other citizens of his time we are able to draw conclusions on the world around him. Stories such as Menocchio’s give us an important understanding on relationships in cultures lost to history.
There Is More Than One Type of Hero In “Notes from the Underground”, a fiction book by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Underground Man is not like the traditional main character in most other fiction books. Often books have a tragic hero where he or she either saves the days or unfortunately is killed. But that is not the case for this book, the main character shows characteristics that do not fit along the lines of a tragic hero at all. This paper argues that the Underground Man is most definitely not the tragic hero, but instead an anti-hero.
In particular, the Underground Man experienced a traumatic incident where he was lifted from his shoulders and removed from the path of an officer (Dostoevsky 49). As a result of this incident, it created a profound feeling that he is meaningless to society. This act was not only humiliating but also stripped the Underground Man from his masculinity. “I could even have forgiven a beating, but I simply could not forgive his moving me and in the end just not noticing me” (Dostoevsky 49). His masculinity grants him a personal sense of power, but that had been taken from him.
Liza, for example, treasures the qualities of romantic love while the Underground Man is incapable of love. The Underground Man’s consistent theme of contradiction is exemplified throughout the story where he experiences a multitude of emotions ranging from narcissistic and egocentric to embarrassment and humiliation. Although the Underground Man envisions himself challenging those who have wronged him, he does not have the “moral courage” to stand up for himself. By remaining in the underground, the Underground Man is able to escape from reality where is able to manufacture his own world. An argument can be made that Dostoevsky used the personal aspects of the Underground Man to show the pattern of similarities between him and contemporary society.
According to the famous sociologists Sylvia Walby, patriarchy is “a system of social structure and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women”. Women’s exploitation is an age old cultural phenomenon of Indian society. The system of patriarchy finds its validity and sanction in our religious beliefs, whether it is Hindu, Muslim or any other religion. For instance, as per ancient Hindu law giver Manu, “Women are supposed to be in the custody of their father when they are children, they must be under the custody of their husband when married and under the custody of her son in old age or as widows.