Riassunto esame Letteratura dei paesi di lingua inglese, prof. Giovannelli, libro consigliato In the castle of my skin, Lamming

Isolation, lack of dialogue between black and white is also present in the third chapter, thoroughly

dedicated to the description of the daily life of pupils going to the local school. The head teacher

and the English inspector are depicted as mutually courteous, kind and polite but they are not really

communicating. They are bound by a set of preordained rules, ways of behaving but they are not

L’impegno a scuola di G è premiato con l’accesso

really constructing a real and mutual identity.

alla High School che lo allontanerà ancora di più dal villaggio e dai legami che qui ha costruito.

4

Ma e Pa: rappresentano il passato e la memoria della comunità, le tradizioni, nel senso però anche

delle consuetudini coloniali. Ma è molto legata alla religione cristiana. È una figura che dialoga con

il proprietario terriero bianco, ma solo per tentare di ripristinare le consuetudini in cui bianchi e non

bianchi hanno ruoli distinti. Rappresentano in un certo senso il retaggio della colonizzazione

rispetto alla vecchia generazione, fiduciosa dell’esistenza di un ordine ciclico che implicasse il

succedersi di tanti Mr Creighton, quindi di tanti governi coloniali.

5

The shoemaker reflects upon the lack of continuity from one generation to another:

“Time is changing… if nothing change in Creighton’s village, time is changing, and all I gotta say

to you here an’ now is this, if time goes on changing’ changin’, an’ we here don’t make a change

one way or the next, ‘tis simply a matter that times will go along ‘bout it business an’ leave we all

here still waitin”. (94)

In the following page, the shoemaker reflects on the fall of great empires throughout History. Even

the British Empire is going to crumble someday and people in the Caribbean are to be ready to face

the change. The first 100 pages are devoted to the description of their routine daily life, consisting

of little habits which are never changing. There is an in-depth sense of stillness and rootlessness

marking all generations. The younger one is growing up within the frame of the English Empire,

culture, education and so on. All these values are bound to be swept away and they will end up

being drifted away if they won’t be ready to face the tide of change.

Pa) + present (the English) coexist but never encounter. If they don’t the future won’t

Past (Ma and

come.

6 They’re all

pp. 112-4: circular life of man: once a man, twice a child. The time does not exist.

sitting, standing still.

sense of isolation. Each man is different. There’s isolation and consequent loneliness and

pp.134-6:

everything keeps remaining still.

Quote p. 137

There is also a sense of circular time. Everything has already happened and keeps happening almost

in the same way, as if the characters were stuck in an ever-ending present.

Yonger generations are suspended because there is not real positive contact with the older ones.

Violence and suppression, intolerance, is typical of both sides.

8

Things are changing. From passive submission, the villagers are becoming restless. The power, the

solidity of the empire shakes. The strike is shaking political stability, the flood ravaged the land,

someone tried to seduce the landlord’s daughter.

9

Chaos has burst and the villagers seem ready to strike and kill the landlord. However, the real fight

is avoided in the end.

10

This chapter begins with the awareness that nothing had changed.

While sleeping, Pa utters, mumbles some words, recounting all the history of the slave trade, the

coming to the West Indies, the process of ibridisation, the origin from Africa but still your identity

is not there (203). Christopher Columbus is mentioned.

11

Even this chapter continues the atmosphere of awareness started in the previous one. Everything

seems as the day before and yet something clearly changed. The protagonist hid a pebble. When he

came back to the shore to get it the day before, the pebble was not there anymore:

“I selected the spot and placed the pebble under the leaf on the even slope. A day had passed. There

was no change in the weather, and the waves were as quiet as ever on this side of the sea… But the

pebble had gone. The feeling sharpened. It had really started the evening before when I received the

letters, and now the pebble had made it permanent… it seemed there were several things, intimate

and endearing which I was going to see for the last time” (207)

This is a moment of transition, of growth marked by a change which has not yet come. The

landscape, the buildings, the object, to sum up the whole scenario of his life has not changed

apparently. But He has grown up. His horizons are widening, the world he lives in does not embrace

the village anymore. Contacts are not possible any longer:

“It was more difficult to participate in their life. They didn’t mind having me around to hear what

happened in the High School, but they had nothing to communicate since my allegiances, they

thought, had been transferred to the other world. If I asserted myself they made it clear that I didn’t

belong--- they excluded me from their world just as my memory of them and the village excluded

me from the world of the High School” (211-12)

He does not belong to the village he came from nor he can identify completely with the new world.

Un’analoga sensazione lo coglie al mento dio

He is suspended in a sort of in-between dimension.

lasciare il college. He has to leave the high school and once again there are no standpoints in his

life. He meets the first assistant and the whole world is reduced to a man but then he has to leave.

He has to start afresh > feeling of separation:

“I promised that I would start afresh, a new man among other men.

Then the pebble returned present in its image on the sloping sand under the grape leaf, and I thought

of them all in turn. Trumper, Boy Blue, Bob. The High School, the village, the first assistant. They

had all arisen with the pebble making the feeling of separation a permanent sickness. The thought of

seeing things for the last time…” (219)

The pebble keeps returning as a symbol of what changes, of the sense of separateness. It functions

at a certain point as Proust’s madeleine, it triggers a whole series of images, flashbacks which are

L’immagine del sassolino ritorna alla fine del

alive just in his mind. Actually they are already gone.