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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 3 page essay on the Emile Zola novel 'Germinal.' The writer details the main characters and the ideologies they represent, as well as some of the key incidents in the book. No bibliography.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Zola.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
However, even so, at the end of the novel, their cause is still alive and there is hope for the future. But the characters and the situation both are
intended to be symbolic of various ideological positions regarding economic and social class struggles at the time. Most of the action in the book is related to the great miners
strike at the Montsou mines in 1866. Yet the actual strike does not occur until a third of the way through the book. The early chapters set the
stage and delineate the characters positions, showing how drab life is for the miners and how the wealthy elements live off of them. It is interesting that Zola does
not make the miners all sympathetic and the owners and capitalists all evil. Rather, he has both groups represented by a mixture. The action begins with Etienne
Lantier, a young man, arrives at the Montsou mine to begin work, and continues as he increasingly plays an important role in the miners lives for the next eight months.
He is a Marxist, and an outsider who can look at the whole situation with a fresh eye. But his main rival for leadership of the miners is
Rasseneur, a former miner who was fired for participating in a previous strike. He is more of a reformer than Lantier. And Lantier, already a socialist, flirts at
one point with the theories of total destruction preached by Souvarine, a Russian nihilist who supports terrorist tactics to wipe the whole current society out with the intent to start
fresh and build a better world. The miners are represented by several types of characters. The good miners are represented primarily by the Maheus, a family with seven children,
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