Bursting the Ball

I enjoyed reading Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh, and how absurd it all is. Even as I enjoyed, I could help getting really frustrated. The protagonist: Paul Pennyfeather, cannot catch a break, you can’t help but feel frustration for this character. He is always at the mercy of events, and others and is being used by others. This isn’t improved by the fact that most of the characters are so ridiculous. They continue to fall in the same errors. Grimes continues to stay in his miserable state, always ‘being in the soup’. Margot Beste-Chetwynde has the constant need for a man in her life. Professor Silinus wishes we were machines: he prefers machines to people. To be honest, there is an element of a machine in them and in this novel. This whole book feels like a machine: a wheel continually turning with no stopping or escaping it. Between the beginning and the end of the book there has been no really progression. Not in the main character, or in the society around him.

Man needs to progress, needs to evolve. In the other text taken from The City of Tomorrow by Le Corbusier, when he talks about the damp, he sees the potential of the workers, and what they can and are accomplishing. They do not. It is like the characters of Decline and Fall: you can’t help but get frustrated and want to shake them up. I could help but get really worried by the fact that what if the world was only full of these people: there would be no movement, no evolution, and ultimately society would stagnate and then deteriorate.