Research Paper on:
Fear in Paton's, Cry the Beloved Country

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Beloved Country paints a poignant picture of a country and its population poised on the brink of an abyss. As this suggests, fear, in particular the fear of a South  African race war, predominates and underscores this narrative. This story is also about the tension between rural and urban environments; those who stayed and those who left for "better"  life in the city. It presents the "universal truths of modernization," as well as the disintegration of family and tribal culture, which  had previously preserved social order and bonded people to place (Armstrong 16). Patons narrative reveals that he not only saw the dangers inherent in the racial situation in South African,  but he also saw the dangers in the breakdown of tribal life and values that was brought about by the lure of life in industrial cities (Armstrong 16). For South  Africa, urbanization was both costly and painful, as is illustrated by the way that Patons characters embody the suffering of the dislocation from rural to urban brought about. Patons  protagonist is Stephen Kumalo, is the "Umfundisi," Zulu for "parson," to a small village. He receives a letter that urges him to come quickly to Johannesburg as his younger sister  is sick, Kumalo goes to the city to bring his sister home and to find his son, Absalom. When he arrives, he discovers that his son has been involved in  an incident and shot a white man, Arthur Jarvis, purely out of fear. The details of Arthur Jarvis life and writing comes out because his father, James, studies his sons  work in an effort to make sense out of his death. Jarvis was writing an essay on white fear of black urban