The Clown by Heinrich Boell Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

The goofball by Heinrich Boell - Essay ExampleThe joke is a brilliant social mockery, an impassioned, tragic, highlighting go to bed, spirituality, religion and politicis.The keep back also reflects criticism against catholic church. It is a grim game-warfare fiction abounding in fatalism, doubt, sarcasm, melancholy, freeing and survival. This novel is a biting critique not only of postwar German society, but of hypocrisy in general ( spiritual, romantic, and otherwise). Boll captures magnificently the feeling of being down and out and rootless. It is set specifically in post World War II Germany and describes well what surely the feelings of many were. But the sense of loss, alienation, lack of love, religious doubt set forth in the book go much deeper than that.I am a clown, says Hans. I collect moments.2 Ostensibly intended by Boll as a simple translation of character, the statement offers considerable insight into Bolls philosophical perspective. Hans Schnier is the Clown of the novels title and invariably the spokesperson for Boll as the author. The Clown is a hugely life-like figure his pain bleeds through the paper, his tears smear the words. He is an artist, destroyed by loss and betrayal, an artist who has reached the lowest point of his existence and now despairs in the knowledge of his own miserable tragedy.The book is told first person by its hero, a clown, Hans Schneir. The hero, a bedraggled clown, has lost everything - his job, his love Marie but not his honor. A moment of time is expanded by Boll to a whole even out of tragic and of memories of his childhood and his one-and-only love Marie. The life of Hans Schneir, a down-on-his-luck, melancholy, incisive clown could represent any world life after surviving and living the day-to-day economic and emotional traumas hatched by war and the idiocy of policy that brings it about. His thought center on his own spiritual and emotional poverty, on the loss of Marie, his ambivalence towards re ligion, and the attempted change among Germans