Quote: “John Updike… has for decades been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy… who are all clearly stand-ins for Updike himself” (Foster Wallace 53).
This quote is a representation of several different personality traits that can be classified simply by who the characters are like. The author is someone who creates a variety of characters who are all similar to himself, and one another. This could suggest several different things about the character and qualities of the author, one of which is ignorance, which is present in the author as a result of the similarity of his characters. The nearly identical protagonists also help to portray the idea that the author is not only ignorant in certain situations but that he is ignorant of the various kinds of people, cultures, and languages, that exist throughout the world. The author lives, …show more content…
Most of the time the elderly are considered to be wise, to have seen so much of the world that their innocence, in essence, has been long forgotten, however, this quote shows a different aspect to the elderly. Childlike refers to the qualities in an adult that are similar to the GOOD qualities of a child, such as their hopeful and positive view of the world, whereas old is seen as someone who is no longer young. The two words are at a conflict with each other in this sentence. The expression of those in the room are, put simply, the sudden change between the person having childlike qualities to turning into someone who no longer has a child’s view of the world. Those in the room, no matter their age, have finally lost all of their innocence, and it has drained them, transforming them into something that they have never