(18) ‘senses his life has run to seed’(5 ).He feels an urgent riptide drawing him far out, where caught in the hell of loneliness, he cries for help (4). And he confesses to his friend Janet:
I’m young, employed, healthy, ambitious
Sound solvent, self-made, self possessed.
But all my symptoms are perinicious.
The sunflower of my youth is wilting.(14)
Therefore John who apparently has everything is still deeply unhappy. John’s problem is not external, so much as internal. In despair John seeks out for help from her. She prescribes a lover to the remedy of his loneliness. She suggests advertisement as a modus operandi and says; ‘You need a lover, John, I think. Someone, I’d say, who’s fun to be with’. (14&15)
The critique of Yuppie materialism
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The biblical story of Adam and Eve may be illustrated as a yarn of alienation ‘from God and nature, alienation through conscience and reason, alienation from home, or from nature, alienation in work and in marriage’.(www.eojournals.org) In the work of a famous humanist Erich Fromm’s Credo (1962) he opines that : Man who is endowed with reason, awareness of his own self as a separate entity and of others, and who exists apart from him, has no other alternative but to feel alienated in this temporal existence in this world. In short, to be human is to be alienated. The fact of human existence implies alienation. No one comes into the world of his own volition. He is simply thrown into existence.(Erich Fromm …show more content…
That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. (https://books.google .co .in)
The tremendous growth of mechanical power has its corresponding impact on human personality. Whereas previously, he was part of a group whether a household, a monastery or a guild, now he is thrown on his own individual resources`. Outside in society, modern man is increasingly being treated as a commodity, which experiences his life forces as on investment existing market conditions. His worth as a man does not lie in his innate qualities, but in his material success which follows the rules of the competitive market, which hardly betray any regard for human potentialities.
John best exemplifies this dilemma of modern man. He has all he could want in terms of material acquisition, is handsome, smart, well mannered, well read- in essence, the perfect companion and yet he is lost and lonely. Seth presents the pathology behind this. In his carefree youth, John has not given love the attention it deserves, preferring the freedom that bachelorhood connects to most men to the shackles of