The Great Santini
By: Pat Conroy, Pat Conroy
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Windows Vista / XP / 2000, Mac OS X Tiger Features
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Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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Windows PC, Palm, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, SymbianOS, Blackberry, iLiad, eBookMan, and more. Features
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The Great Santini Summary
| The Great Santini is an affecting coming-of-age story that does not blink in its depiction of a tight and loving family on the edge of disaster. Set in the rich, sleepy atmosphere of coastal South Carolina in the early 1960s, the novel echoes the timeless tension that emerges between vigorous fathers and their maturing sons, the inevitable clash of personal pride and selfless love, the jealous frustration that comes with maturity. Bull Meecham, known to all as "The Great Santini," can't push his son Ben hard enough; to show affection or proud pleasure in Ben's accomplishment would never occur to him. For Ben, his father's relentless bullying has become more than a frustration, and he is no longer able to suffer his father's abuse. The binding force in the Meecham family is Lillian, Bull's wife and Ben's mother, a beautiful Southern woman of seemingly limitless patience and deference, but indomitable will. She holds her family together, a firewall for her husband's worst authoritarian excesses. Yet she is also sympathetic to the impossible position in which Ben finds himself, at a pivotal moment in his maturity -- the man-child of a father who is defiantly unwilling to yield. Bull Meecham is a vivid and explosive character with whom the reader comes to terms, as Ben does. Conroy, admirably, does not sentimentalize Bull. The clear-eyed, often funny progress of his story reminds us how close to home it is; the characters and the conflict are founded on the author's own difficult relationship with his father, a Marine Corps colonel who was a pilot like Bull Meecham. (Conroy, perhaps tellingly, imagines a dire fate for Bull that his own father was spared.) The publication of The Great Santini seems to have wrought a powerful effect on Conroy's family -- his paternal grandparents were so offended that they shunned him, and his mother used the novel as evidence when she divorced Conroy's father. It also established Conroy as a great teller of stories and an interesting new voice in American fiction, unabashed in its expressive power and hard-won sensitivity. |
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| A tyrannical father, a military "ace" brutalize his family and particularly his oldest son, interpreting humanity as weakness in this unsparing novel. Tragedy is the outcome. Robert Duvall's performance of the title character in the film adaptation is p |
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| Fierce and fearsome, Col. Bull Meecham is an ace Marine fighter pilot, a legend to his men and known to one and all as "The Great Santini." For Meecham's family-especially his sensitive older son Ben, who is on the verge of manhood-the dark side of the legend is all too real. Pat Conroy's 1976 novel The Great Santini tells their story, an unforgettable portrait of a family that endures in the shadow of a well-intentioned but cruelly demanding and abusive father. The great surprise here is the character of Bull Meecham himself, a harsh and impossible figure the reader comes to know from Ben's perspective, with hard-won love and understanding. |
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eBooks > Titles > Authors > Literature > Modern Fiction > Pat Conroy > Pat Conroy > The Great Santini