Ross Schonberg
Ms. Gubanich & Mr. Korff
English
September 17, 2016
Theme Analysis - The Past
In my English (senior seminar) class, I have been reading a book called Prague, by Arthur Phillips. The story in the novel centers around a group of people, who go to Prague and are trying to find “themselves”. Although the book is focused around a group of people, it really centers in on the main character of the story, John Price ordinary man, who has some brother issues. As the novel progresses there seems to theme in the background of the story that is constantly recurring, which is the past. A lot of these characters are always talking about the past, and for some of them, that’s all they can think about.
John Price, although not the one to bring up the past the most, he certainly does talk about for a decent amount. One of the main reasons that John is in Budapest is to meet with his brother, whom he had a falling out with when they were younger. John also believes that by coming to Budapest he will find a better life, far better than the past he is constantly reminding himself of. In John’s friend group, there is another person who is always pondering on the past, a Canadian friend of his, named Mark Payton, who is all about the past. Mark Literally studies the ideas of nostalgia, longing for the past and its memories. Mark believes that the feeling of longing for the past could happen whenever and that “someone in the eighties longed for the seventies, whether that’s the 1970s or the 1470s, you know so I could daisy chain in decades. But then I realized I could actually document it even tighter. What about annually?”(Phillips 110). One time, when Mark was playing music that his entire apartment building could hear, the other residents hated it, but Mark said once he stops they would wish to hear it again just so they can remember those days Mark said was playing music. Mark, of course, is so curious about the past that he asks john about why he and his brother Scott had a falling out, but John doesn’t answer. Besides the book and it characters talking about the past in a philosophical way, individuals past’s are also told about. John and Scott meet a foreign, older woman, Nadja, who, when they are talking at some sort of jazz-themed club or cafe, her past and what her life was like growing up in harsher times. Nadja tells them how “In 1956, I was living in Budapest for ten years. I was married to a gentleman of great breeding and cultivation, but he had allowed himself to become embroiled in the anti-Soviet violence of that year. Wen Soviets decided to finish us once and for all, my husband and I opted for a hasty departure. We had left it rather late, incurable optimists that we were.”(Phillips 98-99). There is also another mentioning of a person's past, a man called Imre Horvath, the novel goes into detail about when “He lost everything, escaped Hungary to rebuild a family fortune, came back several times despite looming threats and even some made good.”(Phillips 130). Besides, when the novel and it characters are talking about the past as some faint memory, when the characters talk about their actual pasts it gives their stories a more real feeling. Although they all talk about the past and are always reminding themselves of it, I think that the main reason that they talk so much about the past in novel, whether it be philosophically or literally, it is because they are all trying to escape it. That is one of the main reason these characters traveled, it was to hopefully live a better life. For example, John’s brother, Scott, left his family so that he wouldn’t be reminded of the life he lived as a child since he was constantly bullied and picked on as a kid and was overweight. This is probably why the past theme is so present because, in the book, it can be interpreted in multiple ways, and the past also has different effects on the characters, whether they want to no longer be reminded of it, or wish to dwell on it, like Mark’s character.
Sometimes I do wonder why the author, Arthur Phillips chose to have the characters be so focused on the past, could it be to make them more driven on their future goals, or is it just simply exposition so that we will understand the characters better? One thing is for certain though, and that is that these pasts have affected these characters all throughout their years and possibly their life choices.