Should he have chosen differently and do his choices (if they can be considered choices) show weakness of strength of character?.Did he take control of his life or did he suffer from inertia and simply allow things to happen to him? There are various turning points in the novel, where Stoner could have taken a different path.Are their adult characters determined by their upbringing/parents? Can their fate in life be seen as a result of their early family life?
In the introduction the author is quoted as saying that he considered Stoner to be a hero.Is this a fair summary of his life? Did you find yourself referring back to it? Was it annoying to know that nothing earth-shattering would happen? The second tells us how little he is remembered by his colleagues. The first paragraph gives us an outline of Stoner’s unremarkable life.William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known.Īnd yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents his career is stymied his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Our book group choice for November 2013 is Stoner by John Williams.
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