Why Does Thomas C. Foster Use Of Violence In Literature

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Thomas C. Foster starts out Chapter Eleven by listing out several functions that violence has in literature to contrast with the superficial act of violence in real life. Because an often time, as Foster claims, violence in literature is symbolic for something else in the novel.
The first example Foster uses is Robert Frost’s poem Out, Out-, which is used to conclude from that the violence the main character encounters and the death that ensues has little meaning beyond the setting of the novel. And even the title which was taken from a line from Macbeth symbolizes the story as a whole since it shows how cold and indifferent the vast universe outside the setting can be with this small death of a teenager. In other words, compared to everything else and the other possible effective cases, this is nothing.
However, violence in literature can be separated into two categories: shootings, …show more content…
The first novel example is used to show how burning a major’s ban, an act of violence, exemplified the historical background when the main characters viewed the result of the Civil War as a loss. The burning resembled the main character’s anger and reaction to the loss of the Civil War. In the second novel when the main character’s reaction was to commit suicide, the violent thought symbolized the historical context as well of the horrors of slavery and what happens to a character when there is their own self determination is ripped away. The past two violent cases have resembled the historical setting; however, in the third example, the act of the main character destroying himself resembled a possibility of redemption in our lives. In other words, these are examples Foster used to exemplify character-on-character violence. Overall, the range of possibilities of what violence can resemble is endless because it is not as simple as
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