Stoner

“It was a lonely household, of which he was an only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil.”

Stoner’s childhood is marked by a loneliness that he will carry with him into his adulthood. Because of his work, Stoner has not tried to pursue happiness above responsibility. For him, needs must take priority, and in Stoner’s childhood, the needs of the family’s survival surpass other human needs. Even though Stoner eventually leaves the farming life, this loneliness and dedication to toil remains a constant within his characterization.

“He had never before seen anything so imposing. The red brick buildings stretched upward from a broad field of green that was broken by stone walks and small patches of garden. Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.”

This first glimpse of the University of Missouri foreshadows the transformation Stoner will undergo in these buildings. The separation of Stoner from his family farm, the only setting he’s known, is crucial in his character development. His arrival in a new setting that is both intimidating and peaceful signifies the meaningful relationship Stoner will nurture with the campus.

“But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.”

This quote marks a formative turning point in the plot and Stoner’s character development. The description of English literature as troubling and disquieting emphasizes that being moved, falling in love, and finding one’s passion can be both disturbing and beautiful. Also notable in this quote is how literature taps into an emotion and sense of self that Stoner has never experienced, emphasizing the value of literature.

“‘It’s love, Mr. Stoner,’ Sloane said cheerfully. ‘You are in love. It’s as simple as that.’”

Sloane identifies that Stoner is in love with literature, which propels Stoner into his new life and career. Stoner doesn’t acknowledge his love for literature until Sloane identifies it for him because dedicating his life to this new interest seems impossible. This quote both captures the vitality of literature and highlights an important moment of plot and character development.

“He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the attraction of the world he had abandoned. He grieved for his own loss and for that of his parents, and even in his grief felt himself drawing away from them.”

When Stoner breaks away from his family and his responsibility to his family, he undergoes a necessary grieving process. Stoner’s decision to pursue passion over responsibility is a betrayal of his family, but it’s necessary for Stoner to pursue his passion. This quote highlights Stoner’s attachment to his family, his respect for their hard work and their values, and his commitment to the pursuit of love and passion.

“But in the first classes he met, after the opening routines of rolls and study plans, when he began to address himself to his subject and his students, he found that his sense of wonder remained hidden within him. Sometimes, as he spoke to his students, it was as if he stood outside himself and observed a stranger speaking to a group assembled unwillingly.”

Stoner’s excitement tempered by apathetic students is one of the first disappointments of academia. This opposition between student and teacher foreshadows the opposition between academia and Stoner’s love of literature.

“It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration.”

Masters’s attitude about the meaning of the university is important in capturing the ways in which academia can be a haven and a trap. The university as a space for the dispossessed emphasizes that Stoner and his peers are in their own ways unfit for other roles in society. This highlights the importance of the university as a space for intellectuals who would otherwise struggle to be in other spaces. For Masters, there is a dismissive tone in his attitude about the university, but for someone like Stoner, this explanation of the university proves its value.

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”

In this quote, Sloane is presented as the voice of reason that champions humanity over inhumanity. War kills people and destroys society, whereas literature celebrates and preserves society. Choosing the violence of war over the quiet solitude of the university is indicative of how societal pressures interfere in the pursuit of happiness and peace. War is antithetical to literature, therefore again highlighting the importance and value of literature.

“Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force.”

In this quote, Edith is characterized through her internalized but unpracticed sexuality. Because Edith has been taught to use her female body and mind to become a mother and a wife, her life revolves around the body without her realizing it. Getting a husband and having a child requires sexual attraction and sex, but Edith doesn’t realize this. This quote highlights the lack of choices for women in the early 20th century and the many ways in which society sexualizes women without including women in the possession of their own bodies.

“William fell instantly in love with her; the affection he could not show to Edith he could show to his daughter, and he found a pleasure in caring for her that he had not anticipated.”

Another life change for William is the birth of his daughter. Becoming a father fulfills William’s need to give and receive love. This quote also foreshadows further conflict in his marriage with Edith because he, like Edith, falsely believes that he can project the happiness he wants in his marriage onto his daughter. Having a child cannot, will not, and does not solve their problems.

“Whether he wept for himself, for the part of his history and youth that went down to the earth, or whether for the poor thin figure that once kept the man he had loved, he did not know.”

This quote presents a juxtaposition between Stoner’s death, which is alluded to in Chapter 1, and Archer Sloane’s death depicted in Chapter 6. Unlike in the aftermath of Stoner’s death, in which few people remember him well or at all, Stoner takes Sloane’s death to heart. Here, Williams honors memory and death through Stoner’s emotional connection to Sloane’s life and his grief over Sloane’s loss.

“Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them.”

This characterization of Stoner’s family emphasizes the backbreaking labor of working a farm in sharp contrast with the safety and therefore relative privilege of Stoner’s work in academia. This quote also highlights the bleak fate Stoner avoided by following his passion over responsibility. The quote shows the kind of America Stoner was born into at the turn of the 20th century.

“Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.”

Stoner doesn’t receive the fulfillment out of teaching that he thought he would. Until he starts teaching graduate students, Stoner deals with students who are apathetic to him, to his subject, and to the university. This deflates Stoner’s sense of purpose, and it makes him turn against himself. The stoop of his shoulders depicted here characterizes Stoner through defeat, lack of confidence, and weariness.

“He looked down at the table and saw between his arms the image of his face reflected in the high polish of the walnut top. The image was dark, and he could not make out its features; it was as if he saw a ghost glimmering unsubstantially out of a hardness, coming to meet him.”

This moment occurs during Charles Walker’s oral examinations, when it becomes clear to Stoner that the integrity of his profession is being compromised by some sort of pact between Hollis and Walker. The imagery of Stoner’s reflection as ghostly, unsubstantial, hard, and dark foreshadows Stoner’s falling into obscurity in his career and life, a fall that begins with Charles Walker. This moment is emblematic of some of the struggles of university life for Stoner.

“But he no longer had the rapport with them that he once had had; he was a special figure, and one was seen with him, or not seen with him, for special reasons. He came to feel that his presence was an embarrassment both to his friends and his enemies, and so he kept more and more to himself.

This quote marks the difficult and negative shift in Stoner’s identity as a teacher. The feud with Hollis prevents him from being fully embraced by his students, who worry that a too-close association with Stoner will bring trouble from the higher-ups. In this quote, Williams highlights the ways in which Stoner characteristically internalizes the ways other people use him or think about him. He distances himself because of his perception by others, which only makes his isolation worse.

“He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

Stoner’s resignation to life as futile is indicative of a few important commentaries Williams develops about human existence: Life is difficult and often boring, happiness is fleeting, and nothing really matters. But Williams’s novel is a celebration of the average, boring, meaningless life because the real value in life is life itself.

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”

Stoner’s affair with Katherine teaches him about love, life, and himself. Love is not just a transaction or emotions; it is a way of building intimacy and discovery. Discovery about others, in the book’s view, is beautiful and meaningful because it also opens up discovery about oneself and the world around oneself.

“Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

In this quote, Williams emphasizes love as a way of becoming, an important part of our identity formation. For Stoner, this love comes from several different and important sources. The love he has for literature helps build his identity, as do his loves for Katherine, Grace, his life, his humble beginnings, and at the start, even Edith. Love is an important extension of the human experience in this novel, even if love ultimately fails or disappoints.

“So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little, so that we could—”

Despite the passion and depth of their love, Stoner and Katherine’s affair is meant to fail because both Stoner and Katherine are too much a part of society. They do care how their affair will affect their reputations, careers, and lives. Thus, they put society’s judgment ahead of their love. Being “of the world,” therefore, is to sacrifice one’s true happiness.

“But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”

This quote emphasizes the long-lasting impact childhood has on the person one becomes. Though it’s been decades since Stoner has worked the farm, the values, work ethic, and labor he experienced in his youth have provided the foundation of his personhood. Stoner’s “blood knowledge” is not something he can unlearn, even with decades spent in books instead of in manual labor.

“And as in other moments of crisis and despair, he looked again to the cautious faith that was embodied in the institution of the University. He told himself that it was not much; but he knew that it was all he had.”

This quote emphasizes how the university space and academia as a concept has provided a haven and a life structure for Stoner. Here, Williams uses the term “faith,” which is usually associated with religion, to highlight how important the university is to William. For William, the university is home, church, and work.

“It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.”

This quote highlights the absurdity of Stoner’s long-term feud with Hollis. The feud is so ridiculous that even when Stoner finally stands up for himself and wins a battle, the victory is hollow because he can’t care about something so silly. This feud and this quote highlight the absurd and petty nature of some workplace situations and specifically those in academia.

“Stoner watched them drive away from the house, and he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.”

Stoner and Grace’s separation occurs over a period of many years. Ultimately, he loses her to Edith’s control and his own inability to fight for his relationship with her. This quote is a poignant observation of how children can be lost from their parents to the world around them. Grace and Stoner’s relationship has changed so much that it’s as though the little girl she once was is dead, not just that she’s grown up.