The Decay of The Angel - Major Themes

Major Themes

Some biographers consider Tōru and Honda to be the author's self-portraits.

  • The shoddiness of modernity
  • The emptiness of old age
  • Calculation versus spontaneous action
  • Ivory towers
  • Innocent ardency + excellence = beauty
  • The inescapably physical nature of the concept of beauty
  • Admiration of "men of action" as a sublimated voyeurism
  • Suicide as the annihilation of a hated world
  • Suicide as a way of "establishing" oneself (Furusawa's anecdote in ch.18 of the mouse who drowns itself in a laundry tub so that the cat cannot eat it)
  • The vastness of the Buddhist universe

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