Lord Mountdrago (Somerset M.)

LORD MOUNTDRAGO

written by William Somerset Maugham

Table of contents

• Who is William Somerset Maugham?
• Title
• Characters
• Setting
• Themes
• Plot
• Appreciation

Who is William Somerset Maugham?

• British victorian writer
• Writes on professional and middle-class lives
• Most popular writer 1930
• 25 January 1874-16 December 1965

Titel: Lord Mountdrago

• Mountdrago = oldest family in England
• Powerful family

Characters: Lord Mountdrago

• 42 years old
• Foreign minister
• Higher class

Characters: Doctor Odlin

• Psycho analyst
• Stops pain by touching
• Talking to people who suffer from sleeplessness = cause them to sleep

Characters: Ower Griffiths

• Lower class
• Welsh member of parliament

Setting

• London – United Kingdom
• Wimpole street

Themes

• Sleeplessness
• Dreams
• The difference between lower and higher class

Plot

• Mountdrago dreams every night about Griffiths
• Bad dream= affects his life
• Doctor Audline tries to help Mountdrago
• Griffiths has the same dreams
• Mountdrago has humiliated Griffiths in front of everyone
• Mountdrago would not feel sorry
• Killed himself and Griffiths to stay in peace.

Stylistic devices

• Anaphora
• He was surprised that his patient was late, for Lord Mountdrago prided himself on his punctuality; he had a sententious way of expressing himself which gave the air of an epigram to a commonplace remark, and he was in the habit of saying that punctuality is a compliment you pay to the intelligent and a rebuke you administer to the stupid.

His clothes were dark. His tie was black. His dress made his sallow lined face paler, and his pale eyes more wan.

Metaphora

• “ ..l ike a man finding a place for himself on a crowded bench, and slumber fell on their tired eyelids like the light rain of spring upon the fresh-turned earth. ”

Hyperbole

• “… a dozen times he had been on the point of giving up practice. ”

Rhetorical question

• “ Did their authors really think the men and women they wrote of were like that? ”

Thus the moral of the story

• doing good things is the only certainly happy action of a man's life.