Fifth Business

Excuse the length of this piece; it’s shorter because I have yet to develop a finite interpretation of the novel.

Fifth Business by Robertson Davis is a novel about the life of a man, Dunstan Ramsay, who deals with the guilt created by a friend/enemy in his childhood. He spends his life trying to console this guilt, struggling with the idea of religion, specifically saints and fool saints.

Since it’s written as a letter, the point of view is limited omniscient. Ramsay explicticly states he’s going to try to take on a third person point of view on the events of his life as her recollects so this letter does lack that reminiscent quality found in most letters. However, there are moments in his writing in which he strays from his objective personality. Personally, the objectiveness he puts out is distancing, both appealing and unappealing at the same time. It offers insight into her personality too since he tries to seem all great by writing objectively but to be objective during an emotional or traumatic event makes him look cold and aloof, as if he’s trying to prove to everyone that he’s above it all. (Like a saint)

Symbols

Mary Dempster: is a saint/foolsaint, representative of the Virgin Mary or the failure of one, depending on how you look at it.

Stone in the snowball: It’s used as a paperweight but it’s actually Boyd’s conscious.

Quotes

““My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.”

Okay. I wants to call this pure and utter blastphemy at the fact that he remembers this. It’s almost got this ‘look at me, I know the moment that the would fell apart’. However, considering the trauma from his experience, maybe it is possible that he does. Still, the fact that Ramsay states it outright shows insight to his “holier than thou” personality.

Theme

The role of Fifth Business can be applied to any one person in life, depending on what point of view you look at the situation on. Davie’s point is that whether you’re the super important ‘fifth business’ or not, no matter how you look at it, you have a place in the world and a role to fill. 




Holy piece of flying cows. The summary analysis is over 8000 words long. Totals 18 pages not double spaced. D: