Fifth Business

6 Pages 1476 Words

“Carpe diem!” “question authority”, “live long and prosper.” If one lives long enough, one will encounter such cliché statements. These statements become a part of life and many individuals acquire their lives to following them. The significance comes in why people adopt certain cliché. The answer may lie in that the world is composed of assorted people who think, and act in their own personal beliefs. And everybody plays their own role in the world: roles such as religious leaders, authoritative leaders, and materialistic leaders. This form of macrocosm is captured in the microcosm in the town of Deptford in Robertson Davies‘ Fifth Business. The roles of the characters in Fifth Business demonstrate how a small village in the first half of the twentieth century can represent the diversity of the entire world.
Religion is a rather large role is our world, and is an unavoidable issue of contemplation. An obvious depiction of religion in Fifth Business, in a microcosm setting, is Sam West (the atheist)’s character. Although he was finely tuned in Christian theory, “as a boy (Sam) he had been kept hard at the Bible,”(54) he believed “that morality has nothing to do with religion” (54). This character is a symbol of those in reality who question orthodox religion and choose paths of self-righteousness. Of course there is more to religion than the atheist. Dunstan’s character represents those who are indifferent to the standard structures of religion. Although he was responsible for placing “the Devil’s picture book - into the hands of his (the Reverend) son Paul (42), Dunstan did not feel he had done wrong, “I had been a fool to forget how dead set Baptists were against cards. As for the stories about saints, they were tales of wonders, like Arabian Night, and
when the Reverend Andrew Bowyer bade all us Presbyterians to prepare ourselves for the Marriage Feast of the Lamb, it seemed to me...