Frank Foley
Frank Foley
STONER
Williams, John
Published: 1965
Category: Novel
Themes: stoicism in the face of life's injustices, education and the university, love of literature,
Overview
Perhaps overlooked in the 60s dazzle of Updike, Capote and Pynchon, Stoner has grown in estimation through the decades. On the surface a simple story about a young man's journey through academia, Stoner is a subtle novel which holds its riches in all that remains unsaid. A delight for the patient reader.
Frank's highlight!
Towards the beginning of the novel, when Stoner has begun his university life, he takes an English literature class and has an epiphany that changes his life. When charged with the task of articulating the meaning of Shakespeare sonnet 73, Stoner feels a depth of emotion that he obviously hasn't experienced before. He cannot find words for this feeling, but he is forever changed. It is a wonderful moment in the book.
Life-affirming / uplifting message
Stoner's growth, and reassessment, as an older man, of what love means to him fits beautifully with his attitude of stoicism and perseverance through his life. Without seeking it, without trying to force it to happen, Stoner's love for Katherine not only develops, but crucially, now he is able to appreciate it (see quote below).
Life wisdom
Life is not in our control and it is often not fair. What, to some extent, is in our control is how we conduct ourselves in the face of life's injustices. Understanding this, ironically, could be the the very thing that helps us deal with it.
A Personal Note
Like so many others, I came late to an appreciation of Williams' often overlooked novel. Funnily enough at the time I was pursuing my own readings of stoic philosophy, in light of the recent resurgence of interest in the last ten years or so. The novel never, I think, explicitly mentions stoicism, but Stoner's attitude, and his responses to the vicissitudes of his life have always struck me as having a thread of stoicism running through them.
Quoted passages
QUOTE: "In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."