Wednesday, December 3 ~ What is Paradox?

ROOTS
*Quick review.

100 Mountains ~ New Lit Term: Paradox
*Please take notes and answer the question below on the last page of your Part 3 Questions.

PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. G.K. Chesterton was a master of paradox.  He called it: “truth standing on its head to gain attention.”

•  "without laws, we can have no freedom."
• Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32).
• “Less is more.”  It means that the most effective writing is clear and focused; everything extraneous is avoided. 
• “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
• Another example is Christ’s paradox: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it” (Lk. 9:24).
• About Darwinism, Chesterton commented: "It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."

What details from the novel so far reveal some sort of paradox? How does Grande's use of situational paradox make the novel more interesting?

Reading: Pages 196-224 and Part 3 Questions #14-19.