The Last Puritan - Symbolism and A Summary of Santayana's Implications

Symbolism and A Summary of Santayana's Implications

Many readers and critics have been curious as to just how much Santayana's own life and views are demonstrated through the novel's characters. In one of the author's letters, of which there is an astounding collection, Santayana claimed the novel gave "the emotions of my experience, and not my thoughts or experiences themselves." This is vital in understanding the nature of a novel which, to an extent, lends itself quite easily to misunderstandings and criticisms. Indeed, some of the confusion stems from the subtitle A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, which may lead one to believe that Oliver alone is the fictional representation of Santayana.

Read more about this topic:  The Last Puritan

Famous quotes containing the words symbolism, summary and/or implications:

    ...I remembered the rose bush that had reached a thorny branch out through the ragged fence, and caught my dress, detaining me when I would have passed on. And again the symbolism of it all came over me. These memories and visions of the poor—they were the clutch of the thorns. Social workers have all felt it. It holds them to their work, because the thorns curve backward, and one cannot pull away.
    Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)

    Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)

    When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)