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A Canticle For Leibowitz Analysis

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Walter M. Miller Jr. in his novel A Canticle for Leibowitz expresses his own unique style of writing, which originated after the events of WWII. Christianity and church plays a major role in the novel, and as a result Miller abundantly uses terms that are related to Christianity. The style used by the author represents and emphasize the idea and importance of religion, and this is achieved by using Latin throughout the novel. This emphasizes and draws more similarities to the Catholic Church as Latin became Church's language in the 4th century. The titles of the three different parts of A Canticle for Leibowitz are written in Latin 'Fiat Homo', 'Fiat Lux' and 'Fiat Voluntas Tua' which trasnlates to 'Let there be man', 'He became man' and 'Let …show more content…

You need to now. Well, can you speak?" (Miller, 1959, 300) "You need to now" is deliberately written incorrectly by the author, as phonetically 'know' and 'now' sounds similar to each other. A Canticle for Leibowitz consists of 30 chapters which are divided in to three different parts 'Fiat Homo', 'Fiat Lux' and 'Fiat Voluntas Tua'. The story is linear from the very start to the end, yet it has many 'jumps' in between. The massive and constant jumps in time makes the novel rather unique compared to others, as most of the novels begins and ends at the same century, yet Miller's novel spawns roughly 12th centuries of narration. In the end A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the common trope of post-apocalyptic literature; leaving an open end for interpretation. The tone is constantly changing from dark and bleak to hopeful and beautiful, yet ironic at the same time. The destroyed world after the apocalypse is described bleakly by the author, but when the saved knowledge is brought up, the tone becomes more hopeful towards the humanity, which gets darker and bleaker as the story progresses and the old technologies of mass destruction, begins to

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