Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the first such post, and is one of two about E. M. Forester’s A Room with a View.
I must confess to having hard a very hard time reading this novel. Whether it was the pacing, the characters, or the at-times impenetrable British’ness of it, whichever it was the book took me far longer to read than 230 pages should have.
‘Well, thank you so much,’ she repeated. ‘How quickly these accidents do happen, and then one returns to the old life!’
‘I don’t.’
Anxiety moved her to question him.
His answer was puzzling: ‘I shall probably want to live.’– from page 66, of the Penguin Classics paperback edition of E.M. Forester’s A Room with a View
This one passage tells you all that you need to know about the two main characters. Lucy and George have just experienced one of those moments in life where something unpredictable, some thing dramatic, has happened and they have to choose how they will let it affect them.
Lucy look at it as an accident, it happens and then you go back to being who you were before, without letting it touch or have an effect upon you.
George looks at that as a death, and instead intends to make the event a part of himself, to accept it and to move forward in being who he is now.
This describes the two of them rather well. Lucy’s passivity through out the story, her actions being rejections of life. George trying to make events part of his life, to be inclusive of events instead of exclusive.