This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The Magus is the story of a man who wished for adventure only to be disappointed when that wish comes true. On our first reading of the book, the hero progresses from ignorance to knowledge and from solitude to fulfilled love, acquiring en route a number of important philosophical truths. the novel, the Fool shares some characteristics with Nicholas. And we are right to feel this uncertainty: for The Magus is a novel of paradox. If the Tarot cards, especially those of Greater Arcana stand for the characters in. In the face of such spleen we begin to wonder how much the narrator really has changed. There is a lot packed into the opening sentence, as if once started the narrator could not draw breath until his pent-up feelings had been discharged: ‘middle-class’, ‘English’, ‘grotesquely elongated’, ‘monstrous dwarf - the epithets, whether neutral or pejorative, tumble out in an accusing rush, and the prevailing tone seems not so much regretful as resentful. But the second feature, one which stands out rather sharply in this brief extract, is the curious bitterness (not to say exaggeration) of its tone. One is its focus on the central character, who is also the narrator: we learn right from the start that he is ‘not the person to be’, a discovery which is in itself a kind of personal development, and we expect that further development will follow.

The opening brings to our attention two major features of the book. 10, 1965 In the symbolism of the Tarot cards, the magus is a magician as well as a mountebank. Thus begins The Magus, 1 Fowles’s third published work and the one which offers the first full-scale development of the themes and methods of his fiction. THE MAGUS by John Fowles RELEASE DATE: Jan.

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