I'm going to be honest with you guys: Lytton Strachey is hilarious. The guy cracks me
up. His jokes are frequently used not only to amuse, but to also quickly change the reader's opinion of a person. Though he starts out good-naturedly with the playful ribbing of Nightingale as a child, saying that her "vision of heaven itself [was] filled with suffering patients to whom she was being useful," he does nothing but build up the woman and her achievements, particularly in Scutari. Strachey does not unleash his acerbic wit upon her until the final portion of the text, when he speaks of her failings" the complete lack of understanding of germ theory, her lack of compassion toward friends, her misguided ventures into writings on the metaphysical.
For example: "Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Diety and the Drains."
Ha!
Strachey finishes his biography of Nightingale by recounting her moments of regret and doubt in her later years, upon realization that she caused just as much harm as good. Though he gets some good jabs in there, in the end earns more pity than scorn.
The jokes however, get an A+.
I completely agree. Altough Strachey uses literary techniques such as rich diction and symbolic imagery, neither of these even comes close to being as effective as the bitter, sarcastic humor found in his writings. Not only does this make his writing unique in a sense, but in my opinion it makes it far more enjoyable!
ReplyDeleteI also agree that Stachey was hilarious. I like the uncertainty that exists throughout the text. Readers can sense how an author feels about his subject. I like that Strachey blurs the line between admiration and critical analysis. His method provides a rounded look at Nightingale outside of the stereotypes. She was an iconoclastic, brilliant woman, who was also demanding (to the point of death), and an incompetent religious philospher. Strachey does a great job trying reveal who she was and wasn't.
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