Sunday, September 16, 2012
H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N
I've actually read "The Education of Hyman Kaplan" before and I have to say it's a lot funnier the second time you read it. The first time I read it I spent so much time feeling bad for Hyman for being picked on in his class that I couldn't really appreciate the humor of the novel. However, now that I went back and already knew that Hyman gets even at the end of the novel I was able to read without a feeling of sympathy but sort of like I knew the same secret Hyman did, that he wasn't an idiot but was only playing the part of the "dumb immigrant" he was being treated like. If you are a first time reader of this story did you feel sorry for Hyman throughout the entire book? If so how did you feel about the ending?
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Actually, I don't feel bad for Kaplan at all. Everything he says is absolutely great - and not because of him being the uneducated immigrant, but because of the things he said which followed logic but not grammar. Take, for example, his use of "Bad - worse - rotten." If you start thinking as a non-native speaker of a language, it starts to make sense: of course rotten is a worse word than worse - it has a deeper meaning to Kaplan than worse, and so, it is in fact, the worst.
ReplyDeleteWhile I admit that the story is played for laughs, it's great to stop and think about the things Kaplan is saying and how not exactly wrong they are. It's clear he understands what's going on, he just doesn't have the right words for it.