Stoner

4 ideas

1. Failing Walker, and Lomax's decades-long revenge

   As an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, William Stoner sits on the oral examination committee for Charles Walker, a charismatic but unprepared graduate student, and votes to fail him after exposing that Walker bluffs his way through basic questions. Walker is the protégé of Hollis Lomax, who later becomes department chairman and spends the next twenty years punishing Stoner with freshman composition sections, bad schedules and blocked promotion. Stoner never recants.

2. Judge a life by its inside

   Measured from within, it holds a sustained devotion to literature, moments of real love, and work done honestly for its own sake. Shift from the observer's view to the liver's view, and a life that looks like defeat can look like a completion, which is why the dying Stoner answers his own question with 'What did you expect?'

3. The university as refuge for misfits

   Stoner's friend Dave Masters argues that the university is an asylum for people who are unfit for the competitive outside world: the dreamers, the maladroit and the honest. It is not a temple of truth. It survives because it shelters those who would be crushed elsewhere, and its value lies in that protection rather than in its stated ideals.

4. Love as a process of knowing

   Through his late affair with the instructor Katherine Driscoll, Stoner comes to understand love as a human act of becoming. He had once taken it for a final state to be reached, or else an illusion. In this view, love is a continuous process through which one person tries to know another, renewed and changed from moment to moment. It is not a fixed possession that can be won or lost once and for all.

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