영어로 읽는 고전 _ 싱클레어 루이스의 배빗
싱클레어 루이스의 “배빗”은 1922년에 출간된 풍자 소설이다. 이 작품은 중년의 부동산 중개업자 조지 F. 배빗을 따라가는데, 그는 성공과 순응, 그리고 중산층의 체면이라는 미국적 꿈을 그대로 구현한 듯한 인물이다. 그러나 안락해 보이는 그의 삶 이면에는 점점 커져 가는 불만이 자리하고 있다. 가장 친한 친구의 인생이 무너져 내리자, 배빗은 자신이 한때 소중히 여겼던 모든 것에 의문을 품기 시작하며 사회적 관습에 맞선 반항에 나선다. 그의 여정은 순응이 지닌 공허함과, 1920년대 미국에서 타인의 기대에 맞춰 살아가는 일이 치러야 하는 대가를 들여다본다.
Classics Read in English _ Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Published in 1922, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt is a satirical novel centered on George F. Babbitt, a middle-aged real estate broker who seems to be the very picture of the American Dream—prosperous, conventional, and comfortably respectable. Beneath that polished surface, however, a quiet discontent steadily grows. When his closest friend's life falls apart, Babbitt starts to question everything he had once held dear, breaking out in revolt against the social conventions that had long defined him. Through his story, the novel exposes the hollowness of conformity and the price one pays for living by the expectations of others in 1920s America.
Among the contents
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes—they seemed—for laughter and tranquillity.
