Biliguismo

INTRODUCTION.

The quartet is a modern fiction book written by Jean Rhys in 1929, but which was previously named in 1928 as “Postures”. This book is about the main character Marya, her husband Stephan, Mr. and Mrs. Heidler.

In order to analyze properly the content of the first chapter of this book is necessary take into account the theory of Edward Morgan Forster presented in the bookAspects of the Novel written by him and published in 1927.

ANALYSIS.

In order to analyze properly the first chapter of the book “Quartet” is necessary take into accounts the characteristics that Edward Morgan Forster proposes as the main aspects of the novel which are story, people and plot and which deriving some other features. We are going to start our analysis with story.

* Story:According with E.M Forster (1927, pp. 30) the basis of a novel is a story and adds (1927, pp. 27) that story is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence – dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on.

Forster (1927, pp. 40) also says that story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appealsto what is primitive in us. For this reason, what the story does do is to transform us from readers into listeners, to whom “a” voice speaks.

In addition E.M Forster (1927, pp. 28 - 29) also says that daily life, whatever it may be really, is practically composed of two lives, the life in time and the life in values, and our conduct reveals a double allegiance. And what the story does is tonarrate the life in time, and what the entire novel does, if it is a good novel, is to include the life by values as well, but the allegiance to time is imperative; no novel could be written without it.

* Story of the first chapter, book Quartet:

The story which is telling in the first chapter of “Quarter” is about a girl called Marya who had been sitting for nearly an hour and a half atthe Café Lavenue and had drunk two glasses of black coffee. Then, she crossed the boulevard and turned down the Rue de Rennes, and in her way she stopped to look at a red felt hat in a shop window. When she was there, Miss Esther De Solla greeted her looking downwards at her with a protective expression. Miss Esther asked her what she was doing to which she answered that she was not doing, so MissDe Solla invited her to go to her studio. The two women started to talk about paintings and English people and if Marya knows any English people, they also talked about Marya’s husband and his nationality.

Meanwhile Miss De Solla was talking about her ideas of the English people, the narrator talked about the day before to this meeting in which Marya discovered in a street, an attractiverestaurant which was a room full of men and a beautiful white dog under the counter, and the fact that Stephan, who was Marya’s husband objected with violence to these wanderings in sordid streets like that. Afterwards, the story came again to the conversation of the two women.

Miss De Solla asked Marya if she had heard about the Heidlers, to which Marya answered that she has not heard anythingabout them. Thereby, Miss De Solla started to tell her about them, that Hugh Heidler was a very important person and Lois Heidlers, Hugh Heidlers’ wife, was a very sensible woman and a painter. Following of this, Marya asked for a telephone due to she wanted to call her husband and went to a café called Buffalo.

The next part of the story is developed in a restaurant called Lefranc’s where MissDe Solla presented the Heidlers to Marya and started a conversation without the intervention of Marya, although they talked about her in the third person. Finally, Mr. Heidler asked Marya if she was English but Marya answered that she was not, and after that she began to analyze deeply Mrs. Heidler until she invited her to go to a bar called Select.

After midnight Marya got back to her hotel,...