Criticism of William Saroyans Five Ripe Pears :: Childhood Memories Novels Essays

Criticism of William Saroyans' Five Ripe Pears The boy declared that the pears were both the evidence of theft and the proof of innocence. In William Saroyans Novel, Five Ripe Pears, the critical approach that I decided to use is psychoanalytic criticism. I do know about Five Ripe Pears as a novel because I have done a paper on this novel before but I had no idea what psychoanalytic criticism was. Saroyans device of addressing Mr.Pollard (the principal) directly and using I really dominated the novel for me. It is almost like Saroyan is trying to be back in his childhood years. The style that Saroyan chooses by using figurative language and many metaphors really helped understand this essay for me. For example, Among the leaves I watched the pears, fat and yellow and red, full of the stuff of life, from the sun, and I wanted. Another thing to consider would be the point of view of narrator in style. By doing this Saroyan really wants the reader to know what he is talking about when he says, But it was not to eat. It was not to st eal. It was to know, the pear. Of life-the sum of it-which could decay. With this phrase that Saroyan uses it really threw me off as a reader. He was waiting for the perfect moment, almost like it was not about the pears anymore, but about his life. Saroyan wanted to grab that perfect moment in his life before it decayed or ended. What I really want to know is what does psychoanalytic criticism have to do with William Saroyans works and novels. I thought maybe that if I knew what this was I could apply it to what I already know about William Saroyans writings. I thought that Saroyan would say that psychoanalytic criticism is something that readers use to break down the author. Maybe to get beneath the novel and get those hidden meanings. I thought that this phrase was really just something that people use to explain why the author is talking about a certain subject or why the author has the novel end in a certain why. But what would William Saroyan do with this? A sensible Man is no less nave at six than at sixty, but few men are sensible. I think that if I knew what psychoanalytic criticism means to Saroyan as a writer I might know what he means when he says this.