Author Dame Muriel Spark

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Dame Muriel Spark was born and raised in Scotland before moving to South Africa for marriage; she has lived around the world and shares her insights on the human condition through a series of fictional works. The author relates that, having become a Roman Catholic in 1954, Spark, who is deeply religious, uses her novels to address the boundaries between religion and life by addressing the question of where people fit into the grand scheme of life. The paper relates that Spark's style varies slightly with each book but each novel is infused with comedy, an effective means of conveying her deep points; there is rarely an overt attempt to get a laugh, but genial entertainment is achieved such as the wacky, dead-pan comic undertones of "The Ballad of Peckham Rye".

From the Paper:

"Spark has also effectively used her characters. In an almost biographical manner, "The Comforters" features a young woman recently converted to Catholicism. Spark's persistent religious theme is carried out once again with this character, who faces the problem of fusing matter and spirit. The protagonist is filled with doubts and surrounded by doubters. But most of all, she is troubled by voices which read aloud to her the novel she is to write (eventually, she recovers and is able to write the novel herself). Through this protagonist, she is able to communicate that the doubt we all experience, whether as to religion or some other aspect of life, can be conquered. To Spark, the road to success is self-reflection and a little help from above, which she conveys through her character's recovery. But the imaginative Sparks does not limit herself to the use of characters alone to make her point, using a combination of time and her characters in "The Girls of Slender Means"."

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