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Alienation: The theme of the 20th-century novel

by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: May 31, 2009   Last Updated: June 15, 2009

The complexity of living in the world in the 20th century presented a dichotomy of challenges for intelligent individuals. Individual lifestyles were disrupted by impersonal mass social forces. Government demands, international proletariat revolutionaries and hanging on aristocracies warred leaving few neutral regions. Colonialism and anti-colonialist forces drove wedges in class and cultural lifestyles alienating individuals and dispossessing groups.Ortega y Gasset's book of philosophy 'The Revolt of the Masses' investigated the ingress of industrial and mass produced product change and communications in to society and the precipitating rainfall of change of power relationships from 100 years of post-Napoleonic economic and social stability toward a more emancipated condition. World War One was an effort by that old regime that led the era in Germany and Austria since the Concert of Vienna to assert control over greater Europe. It too was fighting another revolution on the eastern front with a rival Romanov regime that would morph into an eventual Marxist-Leninist regime.



Lenin would become a second Napoleon geographically speaking , and sign off at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk giving to Germany mid-war the Ukraine and huge tracts of Russia in a land for peace concession. Napoleon had hold of vast tracts of land in the United States that he sold to the Jefferson administration of the U.S. Government for some reason during his reign as Emperor of France before final defeat. Montana today does not generally have a french speaking population because of that Napoleonic land sale.



Jean Paul Sartre and other 20th century writers noted some of the social adjustment problems individuals had in relation to all of the change; there was not only an existential or deontological recognition difficulty issue; the political boundaries were perennially unstable regarding personal and family values. It was difficult for individuals without secure nations and homes and jobs to know where to find something that was their own. Such a condition leaves an implicit alienation as the iondividual cannot locate a direct, salutary relationship to the environment around him. I get the same feeling walking in to church parking lots full of 30,000 dollar autombiles on Sundays.



One might read about the history of Jewish pogroms in Russia and Ukraine ordered by the Tsar and his ministers to alleviate public social pressures on the aristocracy to change in the value of a diversion to a

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