Martin Eden is living in California at the beginning of the 1900s where he struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse, a member of a bourgeois family. But as Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background, a marriage between them would be impossible, unless he reached their level of wealth and status. Eden promises Ruth ...
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Martin Eden is living in California at the beginning of the 1900s where he struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse, a member of a bourgeois family. But as Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background, a marriage between them would be impossible, unless he reached their level of wealth and status. Eden promises Ruth that success will come. Although an impoverished seaman, he obsessively and aggressively pursues dreams of education and literary fame. But Ruth loses her patience and rejects him in a letter. By the time Eden gains success with publishers and the bourgeoisie who had shunned him, he has developed a grudge against them and become jaded by toil and unrequited love. His success fails to satisfy him, and he comes to believe that people did not value him for himself or for his work but only for his fame. Martin Eden is considered a semiautobiographical novel in which Jack London expressed his critique of individualism.
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Among my friend it's very common to listen Pink Floyd's "Another brick in the wall" after reading Martin Eden. The book is very succesful for drawing a concrete portrait of a highly-bourgeoisly-educated person as Ruth Morse, whom Martin felt in love with. On the other hand there is Martin Eden, a sailor who educates himself especially in and soon becomes an author. The main theme is the struggle of initially uneducated sailor Martin's efforts to be with Ruth, member of a bourgeois family. By the time he self-teaches and develops a world view combining Nietzsche-oriented individualism and social darwinism. There are interesting dialogues in the book that clearly indicates the limits of Ruth's thinking, based on modern and blindly bourgeois education. Whereas, Martin can simply criticize anything. The book ends tragically. However, it is a great book to read hence see the potential of human ability.