Stoner is the story of the titular character’s journey from the farms of rural Missouri to the halls of the great state’s university. On the journey, William Stoner epitomizes the intellectual transformation that many 19th century Americans took when they migrated from the hollers of rural America to the classrooms and institutions that would define the 20th. For Stoner, the catalyst of his transformation is an encounter with Archer Sloan. Sloan is the consummate mentor who has a genuine life of the mind and, through his revulsion and rejection of the first World War, illustrates his keen grasp on human nature and its value. After encountering Sloan, Stoner is seduced by the university life and becomes a professor of the humanities. Though the life of his mind is his only solace in a life fraught with emptiness, bitterness and disappointment, even the intellectual life is something he only briefly makes contact with here and there because of the pressure of global conflict, interdepartmental struggle, and familial unrest. I think that his brief affair with Catherine Driscoll which coincidentally is intertwined with their shared passion for the world of ideas seems to illustrate how brief, fleeting and elusive the joy of discovery is. The affair with Catherine is just one of the extended conceits that seem to operate allegorically in the novel. Another is the way that Williams describes Stoner coming to be aware of the look and feel of his own body as he begins to study the humanities illustrating the way his studies expand his understanding of human nature; or the physical deformities of both Charles Walker and Hollis Lomax that seem to display on their exterior the true nature of the institution that Stoner inhabits for his entire academic career. In the end, Stoner’s life is brief, fleeting, and only rarely punctuated by moments of true beauty, and in that way, his existence is a mirror for all of us.
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