Changing_Places

Changing Places East Meets West American and British citizens have been making cracks at each other’s lifestyles for decades now, with neither side really understanding why they live the way they do. Clothes, food, dental hygiene, music, and behavior have been the butts of jokes about the opposite, unknown society, but in Changing Places, Lodge tries to write from a neutral standpoint and, while his humor is most definitely British, he gets his ideas across fairly well, even to the American reader. One of the more vivid themes presented in the novel was education, in which Britain and America seem to have quite opposite views as Lodge points out through a detailed account of the six months of mayhem and confusion the central characters experienced. Education is typically not a subject from which writers often draw comedy, although Lodge makes a fairly decent attempt. By placing two professors in an educational environment, a field they have devoted their lives to but in a style and location they know nothing about, Lodge first uses a technique that resembles the characters Goofy, or the Three Stooges, in that he allows the characters’ personalities no limits to make them look as out-of-place and as humiliating as possible. lodge, while, morris, one, humor, first, philip, new, make, himself, comedy, characters, about, very, rummage, novel, making, life, faculty, dry, deal, been, american, zapp, way, typically, two, trying, tries, tried, time, throughout, through, student, really, reader