Communication and collaboration are two essential qualities of human nature, but different perspectives and cultural differences continue to lead to challenges of communication and the struggles to be understood in life. This is reflected in literature, too, and can be seen in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta and Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin. Through the use of the symbol of the roses in V for Vendetta, the didactic features of the naturalism movement in Therese Raquin, and the plights of the protagonists and other key characters in both novels, both works suggest that, unless struggles to be understood are overcome, the future for humanity could be quite bleak.

Lloyd and Moore employ symbolic roses to represent life and hope amidst apocalyptic despair. The rose is first introduced to the reader in Book 1 as V enters the Priest’s house with a white rose already plucked. The rose is initially given to the people V murders out of revenge, a reminder of the people like him harmed in the concentration camps for being minorities. In Larkhill Camp, V grows roses, and uses their fertilizer ultimately to destroy and escape the camp. By the end of the novel, as V’s social experiment moving through Anarchy to Anarchism, of reinventing society in the interests of all, comes to fruition, the rose symbolises new life, something beautiful and natural blooming out of the rubble of despair and destruction. He leaves Evey Hammond with a stark warning, though, when he says that ‘we, as gardeners, must beware… For some seeds are the seeds of ruin, and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous’. Essentially, he says that new seeds represent new life, that a new day will always dawn and change is possible, but warns her of the usual human mistakes: of trusting the most beautiful, most sweet-talking leaders (‘iridescent blooms’) rather than taking a more collective responsibility, will lead to the familiar outcomes. Thus the rose both symbolises V’s own struggle to be understood, leading to his incarceration for being an outsider and his revenge for that incarceration, as well as the easy manner in which humans allow themselves to misunderstand others through their attractive presentation rather than their true intentions.

By contrast, Zola pioneers a literary movement in order to adapt the very purpose of literature in order to explore the reasons why people behave as they do, being successful or struggling with interacting and understanding each other accordingly. In his Preface to the Second Edition, Zola says that ‘he had believed, naively, that this novel might do without a preface,’ but that ‘the critics ha[d] given this book a hostile and indignant reception’ because they didn’t understand that in the novel Therese Raquin, he ‘set out to study, not characters, but temperaments’. Zola himself argues that, in pioneering the movement of Naturalism, his characters are ‘human animals’ and he is employing certain settings, situations and temperaments that then display how humans behave with each other. Zola states directly that ‘my objective first and foremost was a scientific one’, and thus it is argued that he is using literature to predict human behaviour. A character with a nervous temperament like Therese, coupled with the lazy peasant, Laurent, captured in the dingy setting of Passage du Pont Neuf, and in a passionate, forbidden affair - evidenced by their first act of lovemaking being ‘silent but brutal’ - will inevitably lead, according to Zola, to a downward spiral and the possible sequence of events that follows. Therese and Laurent become ‘murderers’ and ultimately kill themselves. However, overriding this is Zola’s key purpose of using his novel as a form of social science, to explore human beings and how they are bound to misunderstand each other and lead complicated lives as a result. 

Both authors use key characters’ struggles to be understood at climactic moments of the novels as integral to the advancement of the plot and to the ultimate resolution of their plights. After discovering the truth about her son’s death, Madame Raquin - by now a paralysed invalid - had been ‘fervently looking forward’ to the set-piece Thursday night gathering so she could attempt to unmask the murderers. Despite Laurent’s confidence that ‘she’s hardly going to start blabbing to them’, Madame Raquin indeed gained the attention of the group and began spelling out the names of Therese and Laurent, making ‘the murderers… crazed with terror’. However, at the moment of highest tension, she failed to make herself understood, as ‘the avenging hand… fell back into a spasm’ and the moment was lost. By contrast, in V for Vendetta it is Evey Hammond who goes on a journey of discovery and understanding as V tricks her into thinking she is incarcerated and ‘tortures’ her. When she discovers the truth, Evey is broken by learning it was V all along, while he claims to be ‘set[ting her] free’ from the ‘prison’ she’s been in ‘all her life’. This metaphor suggests she is blind to the truth of the world and he has had to educate her through tough means. However, his ambiguity in manner leads her to say, ‘you think you’re so good that you don’t have to make sense,’ and, ‘nothing you say means anything’. He is, then, intentionally creating a struggle for her to understand him, in order for her to learn about herself and the world, something she sees and does at the end of the novel.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle’. In order for societies to be most effective, human beings have had to strive to overcome their struggles to understand each other in order to learn the truth about themselves, about the world, and in order to live and work together more effectively. V for Vendetta is an explicitly politically-motivated novel which expresses this through the opaque behaviour and characteristics of its title character, while Therese Raquin is a literary study of temperaments and how certain conditions lead to certain outcomes, and how certain characters struggle to understand each other, to live together, and to share hidden truths more widely. 

A: 9

B: 9

C: 5

D: 5