Fifth_Business

Fifth Business “Carpe diem!” “question authority”, “live long and prosper.” If one lives long enough, one will encounter such cliché statements. These statements become a part of life and many individuals acquire their lives to following them. The significance comes in why people adopt certain cliché. The answer may lie in that the world is composed of assorted people who think, and act in their own personal beliefs. And everybody plays their own role in the world: roles such as religious leaders, authoritative leaders, and materialistic leaders. This form of macrocosm is captured in the microcosm in the town of Deptford in Robertson Davies‘ Fifth Business. The roles of the characters in Fifth Business demonstrate how a small village in the first half of the twentieth century can represent the diversity of the entire world. Religion is a rather large role is our world, and is an unavoidable issue of contemplation. An obvious depiction of religion in Fifth Business, in a microcosm setting, is Sam West (the atheist)’s character. Although he was finely tuned in Christian theory, “as a boy (Sam) he had been kept hard at the Bible,”(54) he believed “that morality authority, dunstan, religion, boy, world, one, life, town, deptford, best, never, mary, fifth, business, twentieth, took, through, things, small, role, religious, people, over, materialism, magnus, leola, image, dunstan’s, dream, characters, character, century, authoritative, although, wanted, set, sam, roles, reverend, represents, reality, question, paul, own, mother, microcosm, material, macrocosm, leaders, ideals