His first novel, Decline and Fall, is a book in this vein. It lampoons a whole swath of British society and is quite funny about it too. It was followed by Vile Bodies, another good-natured jibe at polite society. Then came Black Mischief, which is as racist as it sounds and deals with Ethiopia. Waugh felt the need, wherever he saw attempts being made at progress and development, to poke a bit of fun. The "mischief" referred to in the title was Emperor Haile Selassie's attempt to modernize the nation.

This effort, for one reason or another, outraged Waugh. We'll get to that later. He followed it with A Handful of Dust, Scoop, about journalists in Ethiopia, Put Out More Flags, about the Second World War, and the aforementioned Brideshead Revisited. Then came The Loved One, about, of all things, the Hollywood funeral industry, Helena, an historical novel, Love Among the Ruins, a dystopian satire the target of which is the welfare state, the Sword of Honor trilogy, again about the war, and the Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, about Waugh's own mental health problems late in life.

But forget all that. This article is about Waugh's first book, in which we can already see his philosophy taking shape. Some typical Waugh features: the novel's characters are subjected to frequent and inexplicable reversals of fortune. Horrible things befall them seemingly at random. Yet they still retain a stiff-upper-lip attitude. We can also see his conservatism and his fear of any attempt at progress.

But before we dive into the novel, we need to address certain things about Waugh. First off, was he a closet homosexual? It's possible, but since most of us have some homosexual leanings, I'm not all that interested in finding subtle hints of them in his works. I'm not very good at spotting them anyway. Second, we have to deal with his mental condition. Waugh later suffered a near nervous collapse, the subject of his last book, and, according to his own account, as a young man he attempted suicide by drowning (he was a teacher in Wales for a time, like the protagonist of Decline and Fall). The book's humorous tone doesn't exactly give the impression of suicidal depression, but we have to realize that that hopelessness and despair was a part of Waugh. Finally, his Catholicism. He wrote his first book well before his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, but his decision to enter that institution was, as he saw it, the culmination of his philosophical development, not a change in it. So we should be able to see, in Decline and Fall, the nascent forces which lead him to the Church.

But now, the novel itself. I have to admit that when I first opened Decline and Fall, I groaned audibly. My greatest fear was that Waugh would be simply another P.G. Wodehouse. Not that there's anything wrong with Wodehouse, as long as he is taken in small doses. He can be very funny. But after awhile, his essentially invented, fantasy realm of rich idlers becomes intolerable. The unremitting frivolousness of Wodehouse's characters, combined with the lack of any real, recognizable human problems in his books, can only be stood for so long. And on page one of Waugh's book, within seconds, we are introduced to Scone College, the rowdy Bollinger Club, and a man named Alistair Digby-Vain-Trumpington. The beer-swilling, fox-hunting snobbery of it all leaves the reader almost immediately exhausted. But not to worry-things begin to look up at once.

We discover that the hero is not really Digby-Vain or the other rich idlers of his ilk, but the much more sympathetic Paul Pennyfeather. Paul is a recognizable type-the Candide-esque naïf. But he's still loveable for it. He is a quiet, studious man who is at Oxford on scholarship and doesn't fit in with the heavy-drinking, caddish culture of the gentlemen scions around him. Despite Paul's pleasant disposition and his attention to his studies, he is expelled from school after the Bollinger Club removes his trousers one night. He, the scholarship student, is out the door at once, while those responsible go about their merry, drunken way. All of this takes place in a space of five short pages or so, and is narrated from afar by two faculty members. The writing style is deliciously fast-paced and clever. But here we begin to see the fundamental problem with Waugh-he is a brilliant observer of other people's foibles. He could be just about the greatest satirist of the century.

But in the end, he disappoints us. His satiric style can't be touched, but he ends up taking seriously the very things we thought he was satirizing. Waugh clearly sees why class snobbery is cruel and stupid. He understands and sympathizes with the plight of Paul in an indifferent system rigged to his disadvantage. He even pokes fun at the conservative politics of the gentlemen of Scone. One of his class-mates is ostracized and abused, for instance, for having had dinner once with Ramsay Macdonald (the Labour Prime Minister). But then, if Waugh sees why all this is stupid, why is he himself so conservative?

We understand more later on. But for the first portion of the novel, we continue reading and laughing and thinking that Waugh is a satiric genius. Everything is out to get Paul and no one is there to save him. Paul is expelled for indecent behavior-really for the indecent behavior of others. Then, just as suddenly, his guardian kicks him out of the house. He has a daughter, after all, and he can't have Paul around as a bad influence. Pennyfeather can find work only in the one place which will take perverts and sociopaths: a private school. Once more, Waugh's razor-sharp wit and rapid-fire style are devastating. We are introduced to an incredibly squalid school in Wales and we meet cad extraordinaire, Mr. Grimes. He explains that although he "gets in the soup," quite frequently, someone always comes along to bail him out because he is a "public school man." That, he explains, is the glory of "the social system", which guarantees that wealthy Old Etonians and such will always be bailed out in the end.

But it isn't until we meet Mr. Prendergast, another faculty member, that Waugh's true world view begins to come clear. Prendergast, you see, intended to be a clergyman, but it struck him one day, while he was observing his mother and a neighbor woman discussing which silverware to buy, that one simple aspect of church doctrine didn't make sense. Namely, he couldn't see why God would want to create the world in the first place. When the scene occurs in the novel, it is brilliantly funny, but the setting in Wales recalls Waugh's own suicide attempt. Perhaps he suffered from such doubts himself. Waugh is amused by the world, but he also despairs of it. It is full of bizarre, random, cruel events, and it is all entirely meaningless. This is why Waugh needed religion-without it he saw no real value in the world.

Like many first novels, Decline and Fall, well, declines after an excellent start. Some of the humor starts to lag when we are introduced to the cast of high society busy-bodies who will take up the bulk of the novel after Paul leaves Wales. Some of the scenes are simply unnecessary. Others are downright offensive, including a scene with a black man whom Paul's love-to-be, Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, seems to have on a proverbial leash. Waugh's racism is visceral and painful to read, as are his depictions of the Welsh people. He begins to come across as a man of small-minded hatreds.

Paul ends up moving in with Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, originally as a tutor for her son, but then as her fiancée. Poor naïve Paul, however, doesn't realize, even as it becomes increasingly obvious to the rest of us, that she is something of a big shot in the world of "white slave trafficking." In other words, she's a pimp. Paul ends up taking the fall for her and finds himself in jail. Here the novel picks up again. Waugh's back in his element-the world of cruelly unpredictable fate-and we start laughing. We are introduced to the warden who, far from being the ogre we might expect, is a fair-minded social reformer who is attempting to create a more humane prison system. The problem is, no matter what he tries, it backfires at once. Every one of his reforms leads to the most horrible unintended consequences. Looking back on the novel, the prison section stands out as one of the best.

But we have to think about what Waugh is actually saying. In reality, he is using an old trick of conservative satirists. He's making fun of the quirks of individuals instead of pointing out what is actually wrong with their ideas. He can't explain why it would be a bad idea to make the prison system more humane because there is no rational argument against it. So he invents wild and improbable consequences of the reformist attempt in order to make it seem ridiculous. I am reminded of conservative so-called "humorists" today who make fun of feminism. They can't come up with any rational argument against women's equality that doesn't rely on outright chauvinism, so they end up mocking the foibles of individual feminists. It's an easy path to mindless hatred.

Waugh's ideology becomes more and more explicit as we continue reading. Paul languishes in jail while Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde runs off with another man. He considers telling the truth and incriminating her, but then decides that because of her social standing, wealth, and gender it would be literally impossible to put her in jail. Paul simply accepts this as the way of things. He does not fight it, or even criticize it. And here's the heart of Waugh's ideology. He fears any attempt at progress because he sees it as hopeless. He understands that the social class structure is stupid and petty and cruel, yet he believes it to be both natural, and even, in a strange way, proper.

Paul eventually gets out of prison with the help of his former fiancée, although she refuses to marry him, and after a stay abroad, he winds up back in Scone College, listening once more to the shouts of the Bollinger Club. He meets a former student of his who is also studying there. The young man is perpetually drunk (note: that was how Waugh spent his college years) but he is still able to hold down a sober conversation with Paul about the circular nature of fate. After all his adventures, Paul has ended up where he started. And on that bitter-sweet note, the novel ends. This is Waugh's final statement: everything ends up where it began. No wonder, therefore, that he believes progress to be impossible.

So here's the problem with Waugh: he ends up believing in the very things you think he's going to savage and mock. He was, after all, a racist and a snob. He truly believed that human beings were divided into categories from birth, and that he and his fellow rich white men were naturally on top. You have to wonder how he could be a Catholic and still hold these views. I'm an atheist, but still it seems to me that most Catholics have to admit the possibility of love and equality triumphing in the end if they're going to believe in Jesus. I'm inclined to the Graham Greene view. As he put it, "It should be impossible for a Catholic to be a conservative." But Waugh, after all, was a convert. And like many converts, he probably saw the Church simply as a massive, feudal relic and a bastion of tradition and hierarchy-two things he loved.

Decline and Fall seems to conclude that the only thing we can do is sit back and accept things as they are. Even if they are stupid and cruel, it's better that we leave them be than try to fix them. So what can we say of Waugh? His comic style cannot be denied-neither can the genuine fun of reading his books. But his racism, snobbery and defeatism wear thin after awhile, especially when we consider how many people have suffered due to such ideas over the years. The problem with Waugh is the problem with all conservative satirists. It is difficult for them to be funny for very long, since, in the end, they have to take seriously things which are fundamentally cruel and irrational. In Waugh's case, that would include class hierarchy and racism.

Americans are beginning to evolve into the setting and characteristics found in the novel Fahrenheit 451. In the book, the main character, Montag, has a home that is described as having walls made up of large television screens. This is not far-fetched from what can be found now in most American family rooms. Our society enjoys large televisions with flat screens, which can be mounted right onto the wall. Above fireplaces where wedding photos or beautiful family portraits were once found, there are instead plasma television sets.

In the book Fahrenheit 451, a world is described where Americans cared less and less about the full news story and eventually desire just a headline. This is becoming more of the case in our society now. There is a popular news channel now called “Headline News” where a 30 second description of a story is normally splattered onto the screen before moving on to something else, as headlines run on the bottom of the screen with no real description. News headlines and blurbs are also available on the Internet on popular search engine sites such as Yahoo and Google where viewers can find a one-liner or video summarizing the event. Most people in this country do not receive their daily information from a newspaper, as they once did in the not so distant past. Now the majority of Americans receive their news through the Internet or television.

Electronic forms of entertainment, such as DVD players and video game systems, have also become a more well-liked past time than reading. Electronic entertainment has become so popular that many American households have memberships to clubs that will automatically send DVDs or video games in the mail to their homes. Many of the DVDs watched in the home are based on books that the viewers have never read. This just goes to show that Bradbury's description of the future where man was addicted to electronic forms of entertainment and did not desire the written word was not far from today's truth.

It may appear that The Great Gatsby is a romantic story of unrequited love but the central focus of the story is actually bigger in scope and does not indulge in romance. The story revolves in the summer of 1922 and set in Long Island, New York. The Great Gatsby presents an allegorical reflection on America in the 1920s where the Great America Dream was the fashion of the day. It does not uphold the era though. Instead, The Great Gatsby talks about the breakdown of the American dream in the period unparalleled prosperity and material excess.

Fitzgerald tackles the ubiquitous effect of material pursuit alone. During 1920s when new money or people acquiring wealth were on the rise, an apparent decline in social and moral values was noted. Cynicism, greed and pursuit of pleasure became the norm. Parties and wild jazz music as shown by Gatsby in the story contributed to the deterioration of the American Dream. The desire for money and bodily pleasures effectively quelled the primary aim behind American dream which was the quest for nobility.

In the story, Gatsby thinks of Daisy as his idea of perfection although she neither deserves nor possesses this. Gatsby's dream is destroyed because of the unworthiness of his love, a parallelism of the American dream in the 1920s ruined by the unworthiness of money and pleasure. When Gatsby's dream collapses, he has no reason left to live which symbolizes the Americans' futile search for the bygone era.

Nick another character in the story reflects that just as Gatsby's dream of Daisy was destroyed by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has crumbled into an empty pursuit of wealth. Gatsby's "greatness" is in his ability to make his dreams into reality but the era of dreaming, as epitomized by Gatsby's dream and the American dream, is over.

The Characters

Our first glimpse into the book reveals a young, trendy character racing back and forth, proudly proclaiming his name, “Sam-I-Am”. In the background we see a frustrated old curmudgeon, reading a paper and angered by the hustling and bustling of the impossible Sam-I-Am.

The old curmudgeon who remains unnamed throughout the story represents the generation that parented the flower children and beatniks of the fifties and sixties. This older generation often appeared to be set in their ways and hesitant to accept change. The story itself is timeless: the older, more conservative generation represents a generation afraid to try anything new or different. The lack of a name seems to be indicating a creature that is not unique or not aware of self—he is unworthy of being named because there is nothing about him that separates him from anyone else.

Sam-I-Am on the other hand, represents the new generation. The very fact that he is named and that I proclaims himself an “I-Am” signifies a creature demanding notice and who is self-actualized (a common theme of the youth movement of the sixties.) Sam-I-Am is always on the go and eager to implement change. He lets everyone he meets know who he is and invites even the namless to try something new.

Green Eggs as Black Equality?

So what is this malicious change the incouragable Sam-I-Am is trying to establish? He wants the old curmudgeon to eat green eggs and ham. This is a ludicrous request. After all, anyone who has ever had the displeasure of cleaning out a refridgerator knows that when eggs and ham turn green that it is not a good thing. You certainly do not eat them; you throw them out.

But Sam-I-Am is not throwing them out. He has embraced them and has come to love them and is now trying to persuade others to include green eggs and ham in their daily routine. The curmudgeon refuses to have anything to do with it, though and tries to turn away from Sam. Sam does not back off, though, and we find ourselves with sixty-two pages of adventure as Sam chases the curmudgeon desperately trying to find any situation that the older creature would be willing to try this new idea.

Alas! The curmudgeon, chased into a pond and fed up, gives in to the relentless requests and tries the insane concoction with the stern warning that he will not like them only to discover that not only does he like them, he loves them! He would eat them anywhere and everywhere. He would eat them with any other kind of creature: suddenly the idea of eating with a fox or in a box does not seem so ludicrous.

Now, imagine the green eggs and ham were not green eggs and ham, but a friendship with a black man. And imagine that the fox is not a fox, but an American Indian and that the box is actually a Japanese home. Would the older generation be willing to try these things? Absolutely not, but Sam and the youth movement were confident that the world would be a better place if all of these cultures could come together. They relentlessly pressed the issue: through sit-ins and love-ins, through protests, through setting examples, and through persistent public discourse.

Relevance for Today

Perhaps the curmudgeon says it best when he states, “I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-Am!”

More than forty years later we have come a long way… yet we still have a long way to go in the efforts of racial equality. Much of our fears stem from senseless xenophobia as we find our culture clashing against others. Often, we are expected to try something as ridiculous as eating green eggs and ham, and we automatically assume that we will not like them. We reject them without even trying them… but imagine the possibilities if we did!