An Account of an Ordinary Life

December 01, 2024

A life of William Stoner — reflection of many forms that love takes and powers that oppose it.

Stoner tells the life of a William Stoner, his wanderings to becoming a lecturer, a vindictive workplace politics, his infatuation with young woman, Edith, and the slow realization of its failure, his affair with his colleague Katherine, and his love and pursuit of literature. On the surface, Stoner's life seems to be falling through, desolate and forlorn, and he himself doesn't refute it at times, "Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be." But Stoner is also recounting of the work one puts into life and relationship, and Stoner's passion for the knowledge and love. Love is a central to Stoner --- not just romantic but also love of knowledge, work, and friendship. "It's the love of the thing that's essential," says John Williams. And despite Stoner's failure in many aspects of life

He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that . . . He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine."

it's Stoner's apprehension of the values and his faith to what he was doing that makes his life perceptible and meaningful. Having said that, I wanna return to the theme of love. Stoner's first love for Edith was an idealized one: "And you must get used to it. I love you, and I cannot imagine living without you." However, he graudually realizes that, "Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure." Later, Stoner redirected his love to their daughter. Yet, her life became consumed by the battlefield of her parents conflict, so much so that she never spring up from her dejection.

They talked late into the night, as if they were old friends. And Stoner came to realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

Despite the failure of his first love, Stoner discovers, 'that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.', during his affair with the young teacher Katherine. This love was pure, driven from 'lust and learning'. Though their lay waste amidst the conflict with his colleague, it also weigh to the value of marriage in one's life.

In his final moments, Stoner began to realize that it was wrong to view himself as a failure: "It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial." And, therefore, Stoner did not experience the exact despair or forsaken moment that you see in Ivan's death in The Death of Ivan Ilych: "Why hast Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here? Why, why dost Thou torment me so terribly?” Ivan's ending comes with a certain realization of how life could have been, and highlights his lack of awareness of true values.

In its central the novel, as John Mcgahern said, 'is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it.'

He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.