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The Relations Between Art And Life Is Explored Throughout

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The relations between art and life is explored throughout Martin McDonagh’s play, The Pillowman and Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent. They explore these relations through discussing the stylistic features of their characters and how these characters are perceived in real life. Both authors explore how the preconceived ideas of what a character should be is dismantled and the line which distinguishes between art and life is becoming less clear. Another way in which these authors explore the link between art and life is through the act of storytelling. This suggests that life is a form of art. Both texts deal with the argument of whether it is life that influences art or art that influences life. Some literary critics such as Henry James …show more content…

This reveals two contrasting views of what a character is: one who becomes emotionally attached to a fictional character and assigns human traits to them in order to make them more relatable and the other, who believes that you cannot become attached to these characters as they are not real people. It could be argued that readers have become accustomed to fiction having a hero and a villain which is not only addressed when dealing with Warrender Chase but also with Loitering With Intent as despite some may taking more of a liking to Fleur rather than Sir Quentin. However, Fleur does use some of the same tactics as Sir Quentin when trying to get her novel back. From this, it is clear that writers were attempting to come away from this idea of there being a hero and a villain. This notion of preconceiving characters before we read a text is addressed by Germaine Bree, and Margaret Guiton in their text An Age of Fiction: The French Novel From Gide to Camus. They argue that: The novel hero, previously imprisoned in the closed, mechanistic world of determinist theory, he becomes a free agent, capable of shaping his own life and choosing his own destiny.
This shows that authors of the twentieth century were attempting to dismantle these preconceptions that readers had of their characters before they had even read the text. The preconceiving of characters is a way in which readers blur the line which distinguishes between fiction and reality as they attach human

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