A Kinder Reader Essay -- Essays Papers

A Kinder reviewer When unity thinks of stories that improve us as human beings, Aesops Fables comes to mind, non the dark, dank, heroinlaced world of Mohsin Hamids Moth Smoke. But, reading is like fashion, and one mans cherished plaid pants are some other mans horror. Not each fiction can at present dole out moral advice, such as Jane Austens warnings close the dangers of hasty judgment in Pride and Prejudice, provided almost all fiction can proffer tales that at the very least develop our range of vision. Moth Smoke brings us, its intended American audience, into the external world of raw day Pakistan. The protagonist, Daru, is recently unemployed, in be intimate with his best friends wife and cultivating a small heroin addiction. Hamid puts the readers front and center of this foreign world by making them the judges of Daru. To step out of your surroundings, change surface if only for 245 pages, changes you, makes you unable to step back into the exact mold of a f ormer self you left behind. Your borders have shifted, been expanded, even if only by a fraction. Terry Eagleton brings these ideas to light in his book, Literary Theory, when he extrapolates on what it means to become a better persona shift key in which, liberal humanists would argue, literature plays a part.1 At first gleam Moth Smoke appears to be a novel left out of the travel rapidly for this transformative seal of approval. How can a reader be morally change by a story that does not teach one how to love thy neighbor but rather the finer details of how to roll a joint while driving? But, after only a hardly a(prenominal) pages Moth Smoke becomes a crash course in moral complexity, throwing readers chargefirst into uncomfortable situations and then forcing them to make a... ...y sympathetic. So the street corner is wide. The curse is violent and despicable the needless killing of a boy. So the misfortune is long. And the defense invokes a grand conspiracy, co rruption, which is particularly resonant these days. So the box is tall (38). Professor Superbs dimensions of the box serve as a tangible example of the judgment the reader must make. In each direction, on every axis of the box is a different, but equally valid, moral decision to be made. Transformative literature such as Moth Smoke forces its readers to expand their empathy in order to make such decisions with pellucidness and conviction.Notes1. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1983).2. All references in the schoolbook are to Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke (New York Picador USA, 2000).3. Eagleton, 210.4. Eagleton, 208.5. Eagleton, 208.