How does Bennett explore the 'ordinary, uneventful, desperate' aspects of life through literature?

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How does Bennett explore the ‘ordinary, uneventful, desperate’ aspects of life through literature?

Alan Bennett’s characters (in Lady of Letters, Her Big Chance and Bed Among the Lentils) possess similar qualities of being ‘ordinary, uneventful and desperate’ as their lives can be viewed as being dull, mundane and monotonous. Using dramatic monologue, not only is Bennett able to explore the different aspects of life, but also make it easier for us (the reader) to understand and ultimately appreciate the themes brought forward. The monologue style allows us to hear the biased views of the narrator as we are able to see through them and thus allowing us to empathize for the characters.

Ordinary, uneventful and desperate are major aspects of life, just as much as love and death. To the ‘naked eye’, the three might appear to be mutually exclusive but in fact the word ordinary and desperate does have a connection. After all, it is normal to become desperate and when someone is constantly desperate, it totally becomes ordinary. Often, people are in denial and tend to hide the reality by slightly twisting it. The twist is only made more apparent cause of the fact that this is a monologue. In addition, the word ordinary and desperate might appear to be an oxymoron but they are in fact not, because if life is hopeless and desperate, the feeling of relentless and desperation is ever present. Truth is, the characters are ‘desperate’ yet their lives are ‘ordinary’ because they have become ‘used to it’.

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In Talking Heads we venture through the narrator’s mind which is totally subjective and in monologues we only see we’ve been told, or we see the narrator’s ‘bent twisted’ truth. The techniques used to explore the aspects of life is dramatic irony and self-revealing irony, for example, the character Leslie in Her Big Chance talks highly of her film and gives it great importance, however through dramatic irony we have come to realize that it was only a cheap ‘porn’ movie thus undermining its significance, and the director ignoring her opinion subverts her values and beliefs, revealing how desperate ...

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