Fifth Business quotes – Flashcards
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"Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement were called the Fifth Business in drama [...] [of] the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business."
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epigraph, definition of 5th business. Thomas Overskou, Den Danske Skueplads (Translation: The Danish Scene)
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"My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old."
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first sentence
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"Mrs Dempster was going to have a baby, and it was not the custom in our village for pregnant women to show themselves boldly in the streets."
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pregnant women were not to be seen. Why they had to walk in the dark
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lifelong friend and enemy
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what Percy is to Dunny
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had never heard an adult cry in pain before and the sound was terrible to me
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when Mary is hit
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"In making this report to you, my dear Headmaster, I have purposely begun with the birth of Paul Dempster, because this is the cause of so much that is to follow
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first addresses the headmaster and foreshadows
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It is because I was deeply offended by the idiotic piece that appeared in the College Chronicle in the issue of midsummer 1969
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why he is writing the letter
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"Oh God! Packer, who cannot know and could not conceive that I have been cast by Fate and my own character for the vital though never glorious role of Fifth Business!
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mention of book title
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"Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try.
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reliable narrator mentioned early on in the novel
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who was also clever, but in the realm of real estate - he was a great holder of mortgages and owned several farms"
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description of percy's father, doc staunton
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My mother was clean - oh, but she was clean!
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description of Mrs. Ramsay
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So I was alone with my guilt, and it tortured me. I was a Presbyterian child and I knew a good deal about damnation.
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prominence of faith life
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I was directly responsible for a grossly sexual act—the birth of a child.
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sex was rarely talked about
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mrs. ramsay loves to help
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She was not, I must make clear, in any sense a midwife or a trained person - simply a woman of good sense and kindness of heart
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"dismayingly premature"
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description of paul
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it was not at all the proper thing for a pregnant woman to smile so much
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view of pregnant women
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She now breast-fed him—my mother and all the neighbors had to admit that she did it well—but she lacked the solemnity they expected of a nursing mother; she enjoyed the process, and sometimes when they went into the house there she was, with everything showing, even though her husband was present
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people don't like mrs. dempster
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had a face like a pan of milk. Mrs Dempster was small and slight, and even the clothes approved for a preacher's wife did not conceal the fact that she ahd a girlish figure and a light step. When she was pregnant there was a bloom about her that seemed out of keeping with the seriousness of her state
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description of mrs. dempster
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But, looking back on it now, I know I was in love with Mrs Dempster
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dunstan's epiphany
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Not as some boys are in love with grown-up women, adoring them from afar and enjoying a fantasy life in which the older woman figures in an idealized form, but in a painful and immediate fashion; I saw her every day, I did menial tasks in her house, and I was charged to watch her and keep her from doing foolish things
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another epiphany of dunstan's
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was not a village favorite, and the dislike so many people felt for his mother ... they attached to the unoffending son
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description of paul
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He had a lot of curly brown hair ... His eyes seemed big in his little face, and certainly there were unusually wide apart, and looked dark because his thin skin was so white
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description of paul part 2
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My war was greatly complicated by horses, for motor vehicles were useless in Flanders mud; if one was among the horses during a bombardment, as I once chanced to be, the animals were just as dangerous as the German shells
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dunny's time in ww1- about the awful mud
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We had no privacy whatever and began to doubt our individuality, for we seemed to melt into a mas
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the awful war- bad
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Because I do not want to posture in this account of myself as anything other than what I was at the time of my narrative, I shall write here only of what I knew when it happened.
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reliable narrator
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It was the boredom that comes of being cut off from everything that could make life sweet, or arouse curiosity, or enlarge the range of the senses
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his boredom in the war led him ot carry around the new testament which he read frequently
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None of them had much education; none had any clear idea what the war was about, though many felt that England had been menaced and had to be defended
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about the troops fighting
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t was like swimming in molasses, with the additional misery that it was molasses that stank and had dead men in it.
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about the mud on the battlefield
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I write of this now as briefly as I may, for the terror of it was so great that I would not for anything arouse it again
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why he doesnt write much on the war
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My burns had been severe and in those days they were not so clever with burns as they are now, so that quite a lot of the skin on my chest and left side was an angry-looking mess, rather like lumpy sealing wax, and is so still, though it is a little browner now.
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Dunny's wounds from the flare
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I was ashamed because I felt the loss so little
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Dunny when his parents die
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but as I was barely twenty, and a romantic myself, I know now that I lied in every word I uttered- lied not in fact but in emphasis, in colour, and in intention
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reliable narrator halfway through
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If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again
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epiphany- never will be someones toy like he was his mother's
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He danced often and spectacularly; he always knew the latest steps, and in those days there were new steps every month
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about Boy
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I am not seeking to posture as a hero in this memoir
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reliable
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"It was many years before I rediscovered love, and then it was not Love's Old Sweet Song, recalling Diana: no, I drank the reviving drop from the Cauldron of Ceridwen. Very well worth waiting for, too
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foreshadows love with liesl
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So much against my will I got Mrs. Dempster into a public hospital for the insane, in Toronto, where I could keep an eye on her
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what he does with mrs. dempster
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"Sex was so much of the very grain of Boy's life that he noticed it no more than the air he breathed."
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description about boy and sex
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"probably a woman but she wore man's dress, had short hair, and was certainly the ugliest human creature I had ever seen"
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Liesl description
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This looked like an adventure, and, at fifty, adventures do not come every day.
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why Dunny writes an autobiography for Magnus
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"I think you are Fifth Business. [...] But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. "
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Liesl categorizes Dunny as Fifth Business
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And that, Headmaster, is all I have to tell you. Sankt Gallen 1970"
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final sentence
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I write of this now as briefly as I may, for the terror of it was so great that I would not for anything arouse it again
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why he doesnt write much on the war
