"Too Loud a Solitude"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the political climate of communist Czechoslovakia as depicted in Hrabal's novel. This paper focuses on the government's perception of printed material such as works of literature and poetry deemed unacceptable and subversive by the communist regime. This paper analyzes the protagonist Hanta, a garbage collector, whose job is to destroy all printed materials deemed improper. This paper details the plot of the novel which centers around Hanta's conflict between his responsibilities and his personal beliefs and values which differ greatly from that of his government's. This paper also discusses the protagonist's love for literature and poetry which causes him deep inner turmoil due to the unethical demands of his job, which he desperately needs in order to support his family.

From the Paper:

"Thus, the self-proclaimed love story of the text is between a man and waste, the wasted words of other authors whose ideas have been destroyed, and the man's accumulation of the facts and information encompassed in such print sources. Hanta, as well as a mourner of lost words, writes of himself as a receptacle or jug, filled with words of others as if the words are matter, or water that he is storing for a later time, but is not given the venue to pour them out. The humble worker retrieves, stores, and digests culture within his won body as well as presses culture to death. However, this action of storing or retrieval also suggests that even though culture is indeed a physical artifact in need of preservation, for it can be easily destroyed as trash, culture can also be quite durable."

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