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II. Religious Figure and Plot
As an influential Catholic writer, Lodge shows unusual ingenuity in the design of characters and plots to show his specific religious atmosphere. Lodge made a lot of descriptions of Bernard’s development. Through the description of his changes, Lodge aims to reflect the religion’s embarrassed situation that Catholics begin to hold the skeptical attitude than believing without a shadow of doubt. Moreover, Lodge chooses Hawaii as the background of the story with the intention to compare this paradise on earth with the Garden of Eden.来.自/751论|文-网www.751com.cn/
2.1 Representatives of Religious Figures
Compared with the traditional conservative priests, Bernard Walsh in Paradise News tends to be a radical priest full of suspicion. Unlike the traditional priest who is indifferent to the reality, in other words, pretend to ignore the temptations from the secular society. Bernard, on behalf of the skeptical priests, experiences a series of changes like from being shamed to talk about sex to accepting the secular and love naturally. In the end he chooses to return to the secular rather than focusing on the faith blindly and regards the religion as one of his own spiritual needs.
At the beginning of the novel, Bernard’s identity is a former priest. In the first half of the novel, the author describes why Bernard would become a priest. He was born into a Catholic family and grows up in a religious atmosphere. He accepts the traditional religious education, and at the age of 15, he determines to serve God. He believes that serving God can solve all the problems in adolescence like sex, education, career and eternal life of soul. Not until he becomes a parish priest, does he gradually realize that people just want a priest to do the following things: to host their weddings, baptize their babies, relieve their bereavement, and reduce their fear of death. To be frank, they just want some spiritual comfort. Then he finds that he just acted like a travel agent who would like to send tickets to visitors and distribute some brochures to guarantee the happiness of the people. After Bernard has stayed on the altar to make a lot of promises and wishes for many years, one day he suddenly realized that he has lost his devout faith generally.
Rather than the faith, what left in his heart is a radical but true meaning of theology which he tried to resist for half of his life. Ostensibly his girlfriend Daphne is the final reason for his leaving, but in reality just a catalyst.