Is Sharon an intellectual - Essay Example

Although some authors like Joshua Lambert (2009) claim that Sharon is ignorant and thoughtless, this paper proves otherwise by presenting some examples in the novel itself. Sharon, charming and cheerful, tries to discover her religious identity. After Boston University kicked her out, she decided to go after Gary, her partner in folk dancing. But prior to these events Sharon was already in a journey for meaning. Once in Oregon, her world became miserable. She worked as a servant in a hotel. When Gary realized that Honolulu, Berkeley, and Oregon were not suitable places for his cause, he left Sharon to go to Fiji with a wealthy German lady.

Over the next few years, Sharon meanders from one blinded and despondent life to another in a clumsy pursuit for her spiritual being and for God. In a characteristic prose, Goodman develops a general portrayal of society by contrasting her female protagonist against a broad chain of people, cultures, and institutions. She presents a remarkable image of the forgotten generation of hippies in the 1970s, both the fervent, intense splendor with which they planned to reconstruct the world and meaningless despair provoked by rejecting an established relationship after another (Wirth-Nesher 2003).

In fact, Goodman ridicules the ignorance and self-centeredness of that period’s idealism with exceptional intelligence. Sharon has various divine manifestations, all narrated with tons of exclamation points. Indeed, the voice and experiences of Sharon embodies the thoughts of Goodman. Hence, if Goodman is intelligent then Sharon is too. The thoughts of Sharon, throughout the seventeen years of her life, come to crash less with the boundaries of religious beliefs and institutions and more with the confines of her own unawareness.

Sharon is a personification of unusual intelligence. She did not want to know that the obvious weakness of the real world to react appropriately is not the world’s mistake, but instead an