The beast in the city : animal imagery in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet

This study offers an analysis of Lawrence Durrell's manipulation of animals, his incorporation of animals as characters, and his dehumanizing ascription of animal characteristics to individuals in The Alexandria Quartet. Such an analysis offers a concrete method of examining Durrell's most basic themes: the bestial nature of love, the human capacity for degradation, the predatory nature of the city itself. Chapter 1 provides an examination of the controlling force in the Quartet Alexandria. Durrell creates a city which dominates even the most minute details of its inhabitants' lives. Some react to the city's control with rage and seek to inflict a harm of their own. Through careful manipulation of metaphor, Durrell makes it clear these are the city's predators, and an analysis of these figures is central to the purposes of Chapter 2. With Chapter 3, the focus shifts to the victims. Children serve as horrifying image of this victimization. Images of pestilence, vermin, and decay are invariably associated with "the true children" of Alexandria, resulting in the complete corruption of innocence and hope identified with children. In Chapter 4, the analysis includes adults reduced to prey. Images normally benign appear as twisted or broken in the Quartet. Throughout the work gazelles are harnessed, rabbits are trapped, camels are hacked to pieces while still alive, dolphins are pickled, gulls and duck are shot. And in each instance animals are associated with their human counterparts. In Chapter 5, the discussion turns to art, the only sanctuary Durrell offers as an escape from the bestial world of Alexandria. The artist must surrender the physical in order to attain the aesthetic. Physicality is associated with animality, with mortality. Love is more productive when it is spiritual. Artistic creation opens the door to the eternal while procreation emphasizes the temporal leading ultimately to decay.