Changing Places

3 Pages 763 Words

East Meets West

American and British citizens have been making cracks at each other’s lifestyles for decades now, with neither side really understanding why they live the way they do. Clothes, food, dental hygiene, music, and behavior have been the butts of jokes about the opposite, unknown society, but in Changing Places, Lodge tries to write from a neutral standpoint and, while his humor is most definitely British, he gets his ideas across fairly well, even to the American reader. One of the more vivid themes presented in the novel was education, in which Britain and America seem to have quite opposite views as Lodge points out through a detailed account of the six months of mayhem and confusion the central characters experienced.
Education is typically not a subject from which writers often draw comedy, although Lodge makes a fairly decent attempt. By placing two professors in an educational environment, a field they have devoted their lives to but in a style and location they know nothing about, Lodge first uses a technique that resembles the characters Goofy, or the Three Stooges, in that he allows the characters’ personalities no limits to make them look as out-of-place and as humiliating as possible. For Morris Zapp, this was used when he first arrived at Rummage University and couldn’t understand to save his life why no one would make a gesture so expressive as eye contact until Gordin Masters finally returned to campus to introduce himself first. As for Philip Swallow, on the very first day he arrived, a bomb blew up on the floor he was to be working on, and he witnessed the other faculty play off the incident like it happened once a week while at the same time he was a nervous wreck. The awkwardness of each other’s presences in their respective locations is due in part to the alien environments placed in. Morris, being more laid back coming from a laid back atmosphere, clearly made like a square block trying to p...