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Essay On The Importance Of Being Ernest

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“You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like.” (Wilde Page10). Nearly all the characters in the story speak in a sophisticated way with some extent of deception or duplicity in them, which are frequently shown in the passages of the stories and create a sense of funny absurd in the dialogue. At the same time, the rationale of being superficial and deceptive are worth considering. Superficialness and duplicity are practiced by characters in The Importance of Being Earnest under the circumstances of the Victorian-style social obligation of being dignified, the arrogance of the middle class, and especially for Jack and Algernon, the pursuit of more interesting …show more content…

Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.” (Wilde Pg10). Except the rationale of having the dignity to pursue and the satisfaction of being arrogant, another reason for conducting deception to others mentioned in “The Importance of Being Earnest” is for the sake of having more interesting lives according to Jack and Algernon. Finding the modern lives too tedious and boring, they make up fictitious characters, who are used as fake identities for those two gentlemen to shuttle between the town and the country at any time they want even if they behave badly. Unexpectedly, the so-called “Bunburying” practice do bring changes and trouble to two gentlemen’s lives. They surprisingly involve in a relationship with two lovely women and expose their true identity after making the mistake of both declaring themselves as Ernest in front of the two ladies. Fortunately, at the end of the story when everything comes to an end, it is discovered that those two gentlemen, who recognize each other as friends, are actually brothers, just as their fictitious identity proposed. Initiated by the deception of having a double identity, the adventurous and ridiculous experience of those two gentlemen serve as the result of the pursuit of excitement in their

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Question 8: Bunburying is used throughout the play firstly by Jack as a way to temporarily escape his life as the guardian of Cecily. Jack uses the name of Ernest to flee to the city whenever he wants to relax or become free of behaving a certain way when he is Jack. The audience or reader of the play comes to find out that Algernon has been using the name "bunburry" to refer to a sickly friend who he must go and visit as a scapegoat to get himself out of having to perform a task or go any where he does not want to. It allows for the higher upper class to more or less go out and do whatever they want under an alias so they can protect their true identity. This notion that the upper class live double lives could be seen as Wilde taking a jab

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