Posted by Joffre on 16/9/2009, 13:02:13, in reply to "Re: The Vicar of Wakefield"
70.157.17.171
: The amount of disasters surpassed those of typical
: Turkish movies of my childhood. After a certain point
: it was so ridiculous that I was sure it was meant to
: be funny all along.
It sounds like you did not actually find it funny while reading it though. And I didn't either. I probably did get a chuckle out of various things, but the piling up of Primrose's misfortunes does not seem funny to me, though I think it could have been made funny. If it were clear that Goldsmith was satirizing novels in which misfortunes pile up or everything goes wrong, then that would add some humor, but I think we have to reach for that explanation. To be comfortable with it, I would need the events of the novel to be uncommonly similar to those in other novels. There is not enough similarty to Pamela or Tom Jones to tempt me. I read somewhere that Goldsmith could have been satirizing his own misfortunes. That seems reasonable, and yet, it also seems not worth talking about. It would make the book something of a private joke between Goldsmith and those who knew him. Of course, anyone now can read that he had a lot of misfortunes, but if that is necessary to appreciating the book, it seems that the book fails to survive on its own. I don't think that is the case.
There is certainly satire in the book. Primrose says of his pamphlets that because so few sold, he had the pleasure of knowing they were read by the happy few. Though surely sometimes true, that thought has probably consoled lots of lousy writers.
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