Literary Analysis Bel Canto

Decent Essays
Fnu Suolongfu
ENGL3061
May 3rd 2015
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Bel Canto: Purification of human nature in between good and evil
Two weeks ago, we studied and read Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto in the class, the beautiful name of this book, Bel Canto, comes from the Italian word el canto which is an operatic term meaning “beautiful singing”. The term has come to refer to a special type of Italian opera, which is very popular in the early nineteenth century. The style is known for its lyricism and vocal virtuosity. The reason I state the origin and explanation of this operatic term is that although this book is mainly about a seemly horrible hostage incident, the structure of story’s drama, which is the dramatic interaction and relationship
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The first reason that I think my argument is true is that the author tried to use music to discover everyone’s human commonalities during the whole story, even if the person who are the terrorist, which fuzz up the social characteristics of these people. And Ann Patchett intended to dilute people’s stereotype of these characters so that audiences can pay more attention on the true theme of this story which I think is the influence of music on human nature. We can see a large number of interaction between people’s goodness and badness. For example, the young terrorist Carmen is one of the most important characters in Bel Canto. At the beginning, she is considered as a evil terrorist. But after she listened Roxane Coss’s singing and met with Gen Watanabe who is the translator of Mr. Hosokawa, she was moved by Roxane’s Bel Canto (Beautiful Singing) and then fell in love with Mr.Watanabe. The influence of music reveals people’s humanity regardless of your social status. Even the person is a terrorist, the power of music still can call your sense of belonging to good things. At the end of the story, an army dedicated to a just cause broke into the place killed all the terrorists just by looking at their clothes. During this “slaughter”, to my surprise, the hostages tried their best to protect the terrorists. Katsumi Hosokawa sacrifice even his life when he tried to protect Carmen’s life. To tell the truth, I really feel uncomfortable with this unexpected and cruel ending because everything happened make me feel that these people’s soul has really changed to kindness, but when the purification of human nature in between the good and evil were about to succeed, it was suddenly killed by an army dedicated to a just cause. These people are supposed to be the representatives of justice, but then suddenly become fierce in this cold slaughter. At the same time, we can see the

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