49 pages • 1 hour read
John WilliamsStoner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Typical Life as Meaningful
Content Warning: This guide contains references to death by suicide and people with alcohol addictions. The referenced book engages in ableism and stereotypes about physical disabilities. It depicts people with physical disabilities in a problematic manner.
In Stoner, John Williams explores the average life as inherently meaningful. Stoner lives, in the author’s opinion, an average or typical life. Despite Stoner’s lack of acclaim, despite his average life, despite not standing out in any particular way, Stoner’s life is worth celebrating and memorializing through literature, the author argues, because the life of the average person is full of nuance, beauty, and universality. Stoner is an everyman type of hero. He is relatable in the author’s view because, like many people, no matter how much hope and effort he puts into his life, the world doesn’t reward him. Stoner’s life story represents many of the developments many people experience. For example, Stoner chooses his own career and passion over his family’s plan for him. Many Americans at this time did the same thing. But it is still a difficult decision to make, which characterizes Stoner as heroic because he is willing to disappoint his family and turn away from the lifestyle he knows in favor of the life he doesn’t know, which is risky. Another example is Stoner’s marriage, which is unhappy and marked by mutual resentment. Stoner’s marriage is representative of many couples who marry for the wrong reasons. Williams creates a life for Stoner out of many banal details, and he thus highlights the seemingly banal life and celebrates it in its tedium. Although he does not necessarily offer a judgment value on Stoner’s life, Williams does suggest that the life carries its own meaning. It is, in other words, worthy of a story, of a novel.
Stoner’s career is also average but meaningful. Stoner is not particularly ambitious, and he doesn’t seek out or embrace the opportunities to get promoted to administrative roles in the university. Stoner is genuinely happy teaching, reading, and writing about reading. His lack of ambition means that his career never fluctuates, but it also allows him to spend decades cultivating his craft and teaching practice. Stoner’s lack of ambition doesn’t mean that his job lacks meaning. In fact, the opposite is true, in the author’s view. Because Stoner is in love with literature, he is satisfied with his job as a professor and doesn’t need to be fulfilled and defined by promotions, money, or power. In this way, Stoner is typical but dignified. He is again made heroic through his characterization as typical because in not playing the competition game of academic institutions, he maintains his integrity. He allows a love of literature to guide him, and he retains that love throughout his academic career. It is in the small joys of life, the author argues, in reading books, that he finds meaning. It is, in some ways, the joy of a reader, of a passive figure.
Stoner is not remembered after his death, which Williams makes clear at the beginning of the novel. But even this characterization is meant to be a celebration of life for the sake of life as opposed to life as the pursuit of fame and remembrance. It ultimately doesn’t matter how people remember Stoner after his death because Williams’s use of the novel form to celebrate the average life of a man who loved literature proves that all lives, especially average ones, are worthy of study. The life has meaning precisely in its amalgam of small, sometimes tedious, details. It is the story of an actually lived life, complete with all its banalities.
The Life of Literature Versus the Tedium of Academia
Stoner is a campus novel, which means that the setting and thematic nature of the university is crucial to developments of character, plot, and theme. Williams is upfront about what he views as the closed-off nature of the academic life. Williams believes that academia appeals to people like Stoner who are inherently introverted and who are fine being left to their own devices. The academic space is defined by isolation in this novel. Once Stoner achieves tenure, he is left to his own devices. His scholarly projects are designed and supervised on his own, and his classes are his own to teach. Though he has colleagues, they don’t need to collaborate on their work. Therefore, Stoner and the other academics in this novel live in a quiet world of solitude.
This is a very particular, niche type of life, in Williams’s view. Dave Masters argues the university provides a haven for people like himself, like Stoner, and like Finch, who would not be able to make it in the world outside of academia. Thus, Williams portrays the setting of the university as a safe space for Stoner. Academia provides a bubble for Stoner against the world. It gives him an excuse not to go to war and face violence, death, and inhumanity. It spares him from the economic downturn of the Great Depression because though his pay is low, it is nonetheless reliable. But Williams is also upfront about the cons of academic life, such as the competition between what he views as big egos, as embodied by Hollis’s feud with Stoner. In academia, like in many work environments, there is sometimes competition, pettiness, and political maneuverings. Stoner largely tries to stay away from these cons, which, in Williams’s view, emphasizes his integrity. Williams does not portray academia in a very positive light. He criticizes it for not embodying the spirit and love of life inherent in the literature it teaches; instead, he sees it as embodying mostly the banality of other work settings. Many of those at the university join World War I, destroying humanity instead of upholding it as the text says, and Stoner too argues that academia does the same thing. It does not embrace the spirit of literature in Williams’s view but destroys people through banalities.
Stoner is brought into the academic life because of his love for literature. He falls in love with literature because literature teaches him that he is a human being, thinking and feeling. Williams uses the form of the novel to celebrate its powerful influence. Stoner’s life changes thanks to literature, so much so that he is willing to turn against his family’s plans for him to pursue passion. Literature is the long-standing and reliable love of Stoner’s life. It’s the one thing that he gives his energy to that rewards him in return. People and institutions repeatedly work against Stoner despite his best intentions, but his love of literature doesn’t fail him. When Stoner dies, he dies with a book open in his hands. This is symbolic of his consistent and reliable love for literature. For decades, Stoner’s otherwise disappointing life was invigorated by literature, and in death, Stoner gets one last moment to be with the literature that made his life meaningful. It’s the literature that makes life meaningful for Stoner and not the things around it. He relies on literature for life in opposition to the struggles of his job and home.
The Social Banalities of Marriage as Oppositional to Love
Stoner depicts a complex marriage and reflects on the nuances of love between people. Edith and Stoner rush into marriage because both of them want to find something they feel is missing in their lives. They both mistakenly believe that marriage will cure them of loneliness or a lack of purpose. But Williams suggests through Edith and Stoner’s years of unhappy marriage that one should develop their own identity before getting married. Edith wants to get married to Stoner because she’s been raised to see her value as a woman through marriage, but marriage only entraps her more. Stoner wants to get married to Edith because he has a reserve of love that he wants to give to others, but marriage only makes him lonelier. Edith and Stoner, in the author’s view, succumb to their society’s myths around marriage, and once they are in that marriage, they both resign themselves to a lifetime of resentment and unhappiness.
In the early and mid-20th century, divorce was uncommon and scandalous. Leaving one another would bring more stress and conflict than staying together in that time. Even having a child doesn’t bring them together because again Edith believes that fulfilling her maternal duty to society will fix her marriage when in fact it tears them apart further because they, in the author’s view, use Grace in their battle. Despite positioning Edith as the antagonistic one in the marriage, there are also subtle signs about Edith’s mental health that Stoner doesn’t recognize, likely because he is a product of his time period. That she doesn’t want to hold her baby in the year after Grace’s birth is indicative of post-partum depression, which would have been misunderstood at this time. Edith is happy to spend weeks away from her family, and this, along with her constant withdrawal from Stoner, indicates depression. But Stoner doesn’t consider Edith’s shifting moods and emotional detachment as something he should inquire into and help her through. The two don’t have a marriage of love but one of only tedium and banalities. They do not feel or embrace the life within love or marriage but only tend to its material and banal details, such as societal expectations.
Stoner allows his marriage to become unfixable, sad, and tense. There are signs that Edith and Stoner could have had a partnership, even if love is out of the question. When Edith joins a local theater group and makes friends, she is a happier person and therefore kinder to her family. This proves that Edith is capable of not being antagonistic; she only needs her own social, intellectual, and creative stimulation. Edith doesn’t begrudge Stoner his affair with Katherine. In fact, she supports the affair, and his months with Katherine are paradoxically the most peaceful in his marriage. This proves that Edith doesn’t entirely want Stoner to be unhappy; she just doesn’t love him. Another sign of this is that Edith is present and loving to Stoner while he dies. She is attentive to him, friendly with him, and they both reminisce over their shared lives together. The author suggests they needed to focus on their life together instead of its banalities and tedium.
Stoner does experience true love in his life. His affair with Katherine proves that it is possible to love deeply and have that love be reciprocated. Even though his affair with Katherine is doomed, the year or so that they spend together is life changing. Thus, Williams presents love as worth the risk and formative to identity development. The complex issue with his affair with Katherine is that Stoner also learns that love is sometimes not enough. In another situation, where Stoner isn’t married and Katherine is not his former student, their affair may have led to long-lasting love and marriage. But Stoner falls in love with Katherine outside of the social norms and boundaries enforced on others. He and Katherine both ultimately choose security over risking it all for one another. Their love is passionate and necessary, but in choosing to fulfill society’s expectations over taking the next, riskier step together, Williams highlights that people should focus on the life in love rather than the tedium and banalities of one’s environment, such as the social expectations of love. There should be a spirit in the love that the couple embraces, the author suggests, and they should not focus on its social or material details. Stoner’s environment destroys his love just like the environment of academia attempts to destroy the life in books.
