RELIGION AND MORALITY IN JOHN UPDIKE’S ‘A&P’ AND SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘THE PROPHET’S HAIR’

CHAPTER ONE

1. INTRODUCTION

Religion  has  always  been  concerned  with  morality.  Indeed,  the  Ten

Commandments are moral commandments. Much of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are concerned with the standards of conduct by which men ought to live. At the very core of religion is the message that man must live according to the moral standards of God in order to achieve ultimate salvation.

Early philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among them, were concerned with religion and morality. The earliest dramas of medieval Europe and England were miracle and morality plays.

Khalid Latif (2008) believes that Islam is a comprehensive way of life, and morality is one of the cornerstones of Islam. Morality is one of the fundamental sources of a nation’s strength, just as immorality is one of the main causes of a nation’s decline. Islam has established some universal fundamental rights for humanity as a whole, which are to be observed in all circumstances. To uphold these rights, Islam has provided not only legal safeguards, but also a very effective moral system. Thus, in Islam, whatever leads to the welfare of the individual or the society and does not oppose any maxims of the religion is morally good, and whatever is harmful is morally bad.

John Updike and Salman Rushdie, whose short stories have been selected for this study, are concerned with morality. The society in John Updike’s ‘A&P’ is presented as a religious one that believes in morality and associates certain values with some moral

standards. However, the writer uses the major character in the story, Sammy, a teenage boy, to protest against the belief held by the entire A&P society represented by Lengel, the manager of the supermarket and his ‘sheep’.

In the same vein, Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Prophet’s’ Hair examines the question of religion and morality and the writer uses the characters in the story to establish the theme of retributive justice for good or evil.

Religion and morality will be examined in the two short stories and the formalist theory will be adopted in the study.

1. Statement of Research Problem

Researches have established the role of religion for upholding religious faith and religious uprightness. The research problem encountered is the people’s perception of religion, and the belief that it is only through religion that morality can be upheld. There is also the problem of using religion to inculcate moral values, and the notion and belief that one’s mode of dressing may be a sign of moral delinquency. The notion that youths are the moral delinquent ones and the problem of religious uprightness are issues to be addressed.

These identified problems encountered in the course of the research are critically going to be addressed. The questions arrived at after identifying the problems are:-

1. What is the relationship (or the point of contact) between religion and morality?

1. How has religion been able to increase and inculcate moral values?

1. How can we use religion to address the issue of moral delinquency?

1. What is the difference between religion and religious faith?

These questions among others are going to be addressed in the study of the two

short stories.

1. Purpose of The Study

The purpose of the study is to examine religion and morality in the two short stories: John Updike’s ‘A&P’ and Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Prophet’s Hair’. The study also aims at examining the narrative elements in the stories.

A short story is one of many narrative structures. Thus, the study will also focus on the definition as well as the properties of a short story.

1. Scope and Limitation

Religion and morality are aspect of human life that are inseparable and should be treated as a single indivisible entity. Issues of religion and morality have been addressed by John Updike and Salman Rushdie in their short stories; ‘A&P’ and ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ respectively. The study will therefore, limit itself to identifying the elements in the short stories that relate to issues of religion and morality. These issues will be addressed and examined critically in order to establish a relationship with the variables in the research topic; religion and morality.

1. Justification

‘Religion and morality in John Updike’s ‘A&P’ and Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ is a topic which deserves attention. Few researches according to findings have dealt with the short story. The short story has suffered neglect in criticism. Researches deal more with the novel, the dramatic and poetic genres and shy away from the short story. This neglect may have been informed by the fact that the short story appears flimsy and can be read at one sitting. But the short story is not flimsy. It is a complex form and incorporates the features of both the novel and poetry. Poetry as we know is the most complex genre of literature.

Therefore, this research will examine how the authors have addressed the issue of religion and morality in their works and add to the literature review on the short story and the two authors: Updike and Rushdie.

Nevertheless, religious groups and the society at large will benefit from this research, because at the end of the study, the examination of issues in the stories will help to re-shape their thinking and views on religion and morality.

1. Methodology

The research work will adopt the formalist theory. This theory will focus on the theme of hypocrisy in the short stories selected for study. The thematic concern will incorporate sub-themes that will revolve around the major thematic focus to create unity

and establish the relationship between the various sub-themes that will be selected alongside the major thematic focus.

The formalist theory emanated in France in the 19th century, and the concern is with structure, form, and aestheticism and involves other sub-elements such as the nature of imagery, linguistic features and motif.

1. Authors’ Background

JOHN HOYER UPDIKE (1932-2009)

John Hoyer Updike was born on March, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He is

best known as the author of Rabbit, Run. He died on January 27th, 2009.

FAMILY AND MARRIAGES

Updike was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace Hoyer in Reading, Pennsylvania and he grew up in a nearby small town-Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother’s attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike’s own aspirations.

John Updike married Mary Entwisted Pennington in 1953. They separated in 1974 and were divorced in 1976. They had four children: David, Michael, Miranda and Elizabeth. He later married Martha Bernhard in 1977 and they remained married until his death in 2009.

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

John Updike graduated from Shillington High School as a co-valedictorian and class president in 1950. He later attended Harvard after receiving a full scholarship. At Harvard, he immediately established himself as a major talent of indefatigable energy, submitting a steady stream of articles and drawings for the Harvard Lampoon, which he served as president before graduating Summa Cum Laude in 1954 with a degree in English.

After graduation, he decided to become a graphic artist and attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist. After moving to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to ‘The New Yorker’. He stayed only two years writing “Talk of the Town’ columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. During this time Updike also underwent spiritual crisis suffering from a loss of religious faith and began reading Soren Kierkeqaard and the theologian, Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. He remained a believing Christian for the rest of his life.

Updike’s subject is ‘the American small town, protestant middle - class”. He is well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolificness. He populated his fiction with characters who frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations and marital infidelity. His fiction emphasizes on Christian theology, sexuality, and sensual details. His highly

distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eye of ‘a wry intelligent authorial voice’ that extravagantly describes the physical world while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He variously described his own style as ‘an attempt to give the mundane its beautiful due’.

SALMAN RUSHDIE (1947 -  )

Salman Rushdie is a famous writer. He was born in 1947 in a Muslim family in Bombay. His father was a Cambridge –educated businessman. At the age of fourteen, Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England. In 1964, his parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan