The Theme of ‘Escape’: Intertextuality and Compositional Contrast in Somerset Maugham’s Selected Short Stories

Abstract

This work analyses the contrast created in William Somerset Maugham’s literary composition, with reference to the theme of ‘Escape’. Escape is, indeed, a recurrent theme in such Maugham’s short stories as ‘The Escape’, ‘Mabel’, ‘A Friend in Need,’ ‘The Taipan’, ‘The Verger’, and others. The analysis thereof unfolds through the scrutiny of two samples of these short stories videlicet ‘The Escape’ and ‘Mabel’. In real life, it happens to us to escape either from a country, a nightmare, a delicate financial situation, a mediocre existence, or else. Likewise, in fiction, Roger Charing and George escape from Ruth Barlow and Mabel, the ladies they are engaged to before the wedding days respectively in ‘The Escape’ and ‘Mabel’. This escape, an interconnection between these stories, is prompted by their sudden falling out of love, which is inexplicable in the narrators’ words, because as Blaise Pascal thinks, the heart has reasons that reason itself knows nothing about. Apart from this common denominator, the two stories contrast sharply at different levels of their components as setting, characters... To investigate this contrast, owing to the economy and simplicity of the storytelling that characterise a short story, these stories require close scrutiny and textual approach.