Ernest The Importance Of Being Earnest Character Analysis

Improved Essays
The play’s protagonist is, Jack Worthing. Jack is a respectable man with good intentions but goes about doing them wrong. He creates a brother named Ernest, who he uses to live another life. Ernest allows him to escape reality and act as someone completely different. His determination to marry Gwendolen, and the fights with Algernon Moncrieff and Lady Bracknell’s just to receive her approval, shows how he was chosen as the protagonist. “Earnest” is defined by the characters as someone who is truthful and honest. In my opinion Jack was struggling with “the importance of being earnest”. All he had to do was tell the truth because everything he thought he was lying about, actually turned out to be true.
Jack proposed to Gwendolen but while he

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    A very interesting and important character from S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is Sodapop Curtis. Soda Curtis is a teenage hoodlum and Ponyboy’s, the narrator's, older brother. Soda is the middle child in a family of three boys. His parents died in a car wreck causing him and his older brother Darry to obtain jobs in order for the three of them to survive.…

    • 753 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the differentiation between the town and the country is a great, lurking source of conflict between characters, often in regards to the class-distinction characteristic of Victorian society. Location proves to be a serious contention of Lady Bracknell’s as she considers Jack’s engagement to Gwendolen, assumptions about the city and country exacerbate the rift in Gwendolen and Cecily’s friendship, and the obligations of both places cause the creation of Ernest Worthing and Mr. Bunbury by Jack and Algernon in order to escape from their respective settings. While Wilde’s emphasis on the contrast of the town and the country is subtle, it is integral to the plotline of the play and the thoughts and actions of its characters. This juxtaposition creates tension that leads to the unraveling of Jack and Algernon’s double lives, foreshadowing and surrounding the climatic moments of the play.…

    • 1196 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, tackles many themes throughout the book. These themes seem to be illustrated through the conflicts between the main characters specifically the conflicts involving the mothers and daughters. The book also provides an insight at the role that age and culture play in regards to conflict resolution. Suyuan and Jing-mei…

    • 1368 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Annotated Bibliography: The Importance of Being Earnest Reinert, Otto. " Satiric Strategy in the Importance of Being Earnest." College English 18.1 (1956): 14-18. National Council of Teachers of English. JSTOR, Oct. 1956.…

    • 1780 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He thinks of her as very smart and while he’s gone from school early, is always thinking about calling her and talking to her because she is very intelligent and he likes talking to her. He eventually visits her at his house and tells her he’s leaving for good. She wants to pack up her bags and go with him, but he tells her no. He meets her at the museum before he decides to leave and she brings her suitcase. He tells her that she’s not coming with him, but again she refuses.…

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Character Analysis Paper I will be analyzing Lily, a character from the book “Lincolnites” by Ron Rash. The plot of the story is a young pregnant woman named Lily who lives with her child tending to their home while her husband is off at war. Then one day, a confederate soldier came by and was determined to get what he wanted. As this was going on Lily, had to make a sacrifice for her family.…

    • 740 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Due to their categorizations as a social tragedy and a comedy of manners, respectively, A Doll’s House and The Importance of Being Earnest are immediately identified with many differences. However, as a result of the plays’ intertwining themes that suggest the journey to contentment through the determination of a person to appease to pressures given by society will ultimately lead to that person’s downfall according to societal standards, a common ground is found. Ironically, it is the differences in the plays that reveal the connections, through the riddling of lies, a continued man versus society conflict, as well as the idea of self denial. In A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, Nora, the protagonist is the driving force of the dramatic experience.…

    • 1164 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Many characters in this play lie and deny any truth that can cause them to get into any kind of trouble. This play can be described in many words, but using courage, weakness, and truth to…

    • 1202 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cecily also believes how excited Algernon is with the engagement. Cecily makes up this story in order for Algernon (Ernest) to be engage with her. Algernon pretends to be Ernest to engage to Cecily. Jack also uses Ernest to be engaged with Gwendolen. Jack and Algernon both are deceiving throughout the play.…

    • 953 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    As social animals, human beings marshal themselves into social groups that construct the society. Such an act may appear to be a de minimis but forsooth, the setting that people are put into has a prominent effect on the person. In the dynamic play by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, the setting is more than a mere backdrop that sets the mood for the play; instead, Wilde initiates a setting that acts as a nonhuman character in the play. That is, the setting, similar to the characters in the play in its essentiality, affects the characters and their actions in a plethora of ways. The effect of the setting in the play is so puissant that if these characters were to be put in a different setting and say their lines at a different…

    • 1622 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Oscar Wilde implements a heavy focusses significant attention on class in The Importance of Being Earnest. People with and without money behave very differently, though strive for the same response and impressions from their peers. The characters in this novel are exaggerated to the point of absurdity when it comes to their obsession with class. Victorian upper class demands its members to keep up an important image in society and value money and appearance above all else, including people. Wilde satirizes the motivations of these characters and uses their values to question the ideals of the upper class members in a Victorian society.…

    • 1322 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Individuality in The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest takes place in the Victorian Era in Europe, showcasing the strict societal rules and the pressure they cause to attempt to remove individuality from the society by having characters follow the proper upper class stereotypes (being rude to lower class, choosing marriages for money, etc.) By showing the upper class standards and stereotypical snobby behavior through multiple characters, Wilde highlights the few characters who choose to stand out and maintain their individuality by means such as trying to do whatever makes them happy or completely disregarding the social norms. Many characters such as Jack, an upper class man living in the Victorian era, stand out from the crowd by choosing to value living to seek his own happiness, which is different from the Victorian era expectation of being motivated by wealth and status since happiness doesn’t always include these. By following his heart, he maintains individuality from many of the other upper class characters. During the Victorian era, huge weight was placed on marriage.…

    • 1205 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One’s personal identity what either allows or inhibits one from interacting with society in its entirety. However, the societal class in which a character was born, or thrust, into is of as much importance, if not more, as a character’s personal sense of self. Both Oscar Wilde’s, “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” develop themes around the central ideology of self-identity versus how an entire society views the individual. “The Importance of Being Earnest” is a sharp, satirical play that quickly and effectively points out the flaws and hypocrisy of the wealthy upper class as the focus remains largely on how society views and, therefore, forms opinions of the individual. The Victorian Age serves as a shining example of society’s upper class and their infatuation with themselves.…

    • 786 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    " Wilde deliberately uses farce in the play to exaggerate the mind frame of the upper class. It is seen here that Gwendolen loves Jack, but she places greater importance on silly, superficial and trivial matters such as a name, something a person has no control over. Similarly, Cecily also dreams of loving someone called "Ernest." She clearly states to Algernon, "There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest."…

    • 1982 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, each character has a distinct alter ego that they wear at some point during the play. Authorities on Wilde 's play have described Bunburying as “the confusion and then the restoration of identities” (Craft 23). The first introduced is called Bunbury. After this first instance of role-playing, the name Bunbury, or the term Bunburying comes to apply primarily to the two male leads throughout the rest of the play, and to equate to a false identity. The protagonist, Jack, Bunburys as his troublesome younger brother Ernest, so that he can experience a life in town as well as one in the country.…

    • 2427 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Great Essays