Lifeguard: review
Your next reading is Lifeguard,
by John Updike (author of The Witches of Eastwick), page 539.
It’s a very difficult
story for its vocabulary and its imagery. Also, it has no action, it’s only a
meditation about God and saving lives and souls the young lifeguard does.
In order to help you in
this reading I’m going to give some information about different people that
appears on the first pages:
Tillich, Father D’Arcy,
Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain are philosophers who speculate about
religion, mostly about catholic religion and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Kierkegaard,
I suppose you know; Berdyaev was a Russian writer with deep religious
convictions; Barth was a Calvinist theologian; Cardinal Newman, a protestant Anglican
converted to Catholicism. I can’t think it’s necessary to say anything about
Pascal, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, W. H.
Auden and Graham Greene are catholic writers in the Anglican world of Great
Britain.
Biography, by Rafel
Martínez
John
Hayen Updike was born on the 18th of March,1932 in Shillington,
Pennsylvania. He was the son of teachers, and he was raised in a white and
Protestant middle-class environment, which influenced greatly his later
literary work.
As a
teenager, John Updike started to like literature and writing influenced by his
own mother, who also instilled in him a deep love for art. His father was a
high school teacher who, having suffered the adversities of the 1929 crisis,
supported the whole family with great sacrifices and a meagre salary.
Subsequently,
Updike studied at Harvard University thanks to a scholarship. When he finished
his studies, he moved to the United Kingdom and started to study Art at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford.
His work as a writer explores regularly human motivations about sex, faith, the ultimate reason for existence, death, generational conflicts, and interpersonal relationships.
Updike's
most important work were the series of novels about his famous character Harry
Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich;
Rabbit at Rest and the novel of evocations and remembrances of the same
character, Rabbit Remembered). Of the tetralogy, Rabbit is Rich
and Rabbit at Rest allowed him to win two Pulitzer Prizes in 1982 and in 1991.
In his
long and long literary life, he was the author of numerous works.
Apart from award-winning series like Rabbit, he wrote Henry Bech's books, 1960-1971, and also he wrote plays: Buchanan Dying (1974); novels: The Witches of Eastwich, (1984; made into a movie 1987), Scarlet Letter Trilogy (1975), The Asylum Fair (1959), Couples (1968), Coup d'État (1978); short stories: The Lifeguard (1932), The Same Door (1959), What I Have Left to Live (1994), Tears of Love (2001), My Father’s Tears and other stories (2009).
He also
wrote poetry, essays and memories.
For several
years his name was among the candidates for the Nobel Prize.
John Updike died in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January the 27th, 2009, at the age of 76, after years of battling with lung cancer.
Analysis of Lifeguard
This work
by John Updike was first published in the magazine The New Yorker, on
June 17th, 1961.
Of the
prolific work of J. Updike, I hope and wish to read some of his most recognized
works. Because, in this work, the author shows the life, dreams and desires of a
young man, with a rich and very literary prose, which when reading it seems
simple, but which hides and speaks of the deepest and most complex thoughts of
the human being, that they turn this short story into a literary work that
looks like fiction, but is actually a living and existentialist story.
To begin with, John Updike seems to be playing with the word of the title LIFE-GUARD.
Life,
(other synonyms): existence, being, entity, goods ...
Guard,
(other synonyms): protect, cover, stand guard over, watch over, look after,
keep an eye on…
For the
author, the protagonist, in his two facets of life, always tries to see his
fellow men as beings that need his help and his qualities to save them.
The boy who
waits for the call, as he refers to at the end of the story, and who until then
had not reached him and who had studied for 9 months the books and biblical texts, is
longing for the day when he’ll be able to address his parishioners and transmit
the word and work of God to them.
And, on
the other hand, when summer comes, he has a job as a lifeguard on a beach for 3
months, and when he climbs to his watchman turret, he has thoughts that from
his height he dominates all the beachgoers who depend on his vigilance and help, as if he was a divine entity who sees his acolytes from above and can observe
and save them.
But he also
feels sorry for the older people whose life is ending, and he feels sorry too for
the women who lost their feminine forms after bringing several children to this
world, and he cannot help being pleased and desired, when, with his skin tanned
by the sun and with his athletic figure, the young women approach the stairs of
his watchtower.
I admit
that I have had to read the story several times to make sense of it, and I hope
I have understood it.
It is not
a work that I would recommend, but it has made me work hard, and for that I am
grateful to have chosen this work.
Questions
What does it mean: "I disguise myself in my skin"?
What are "teenage satellites"?
What does he refer to with "umber anthers dusted
with pollen"?
When do "theologians surmount the void"?
Do you know the story about "the man who on the
coast of Judaea who refused in dismay to sell all the he had"? Look up
Mark, 10.
Explain "a sheet of brilliant sand painted with
the runes of naked human bodies".
Why "the humanism has severely corrupted the
apples of our creed"?
"Scabs of land upon we draw our lives to their unsatisfactory
conclusions are suffused by science with vacuous horror"?": What is
it?
Explain the parable: "Swimming offers a
parable..."
Where is the irony? "I'm not yet ordained, I'm
too disordered."
"The cinema of life is run backwards..." Why
backwards?
"brazen barrel chests, absurdly potent bustling
with white froth." What's this "froth"?
Why when "children toddle blissfully into the surf"
does he "bolt upright on his throne"?
Who "lift their eyes in wonder as a trio of
flat-stomached nymphs parades past"? And why?
Can you imagine this: "a girl is pushing against
her boy and begging to be ducked"?
What do you know about the "section aurea"?
Can you see "the arabesque on the spine" in
a musical instrument?
Define "mesomorph, endomorph and ectomorph".
Why do you think that "to desire a woman is to
desire to save her"?
What do you know about Solomon and Sheba?
Explain the image: "no memento mori is so
clinching as a photograph of a vanished crowd".
"Is it as a maiden, matron or crone that the
females will be eternalized"?
What is it the "Adjustments Counter"?
"Mankind is a plague racing like fire across the
exhausted continents". What do you think of this pessimistic point of
view?
Can you understand this image: "the sea itself is
jammed with hollow heads and thrashing arms like a great bobbing blackwash of
rubbish"?
Do you think is possible to obey this commandment:
"Be joyful"?
Has he ever saved anyone? How do you know?
What do you think of philosophy? Is it something deep
with difficult language or is it something trivial with difficult language?