Stoner

In Stoner, William Stoner’s personal and professional life, while sometimes triumphant, is often disappointing to him. Although Stoner begins a promising career as a literary scholar, he never achieves a significant title or publishes an important book. Though he briefly succeeds as a teacher, even that is stripped away from him after he fights with Lomax over Walker. While Stoner’s career is disappointing, his love life is much worse. His marriage to…

One of Stoner’s key character traits is that he moves through life in a very passive way. Rather than seek opportunities for himself, Stoner lets opportunities come to him. However, in doing so, he misses out on what may be important chances. Stoner begins his life as a farm boy and only moves away from the farm to go to college because his father tells him to. In college, Stoner is also largely passive…

In Stoner, marriage is a social institution that does not necessarily correspond with love. Stoner meets his future wife, Edith, at a social event and immediately falls in love with her. Though beautiful, Edith is socially awkward and rather cold. She does not appear to love Stoner in return, but nonetheless agrees to marry him, seemingly because she thinks it is her womanly duty to her family. Because Edith marries Stoner out of…

William Stoner decides to become an English major after discovering that literature reveals to him parts of himself that he never knew existed. Whenever he has a difficult time in his personal and professional life, Stoner always returns to reading to calm his mind. In a conversation with Stoner, Dave Masters says that the value of universities is to provide a home for those who do not belong elsewhere in society. In part, Masters’s view…