Resumo de Brideshead Revisited

Renowned in his own time for biting satire directed towards both academia

and the upper classes, Evelyn Waugh left the comic and the bizarre behind to

write a far more intriguing text in Brideshead Revisited, a fictional

retrospective by a World War Two army captain Charles Ryder. Ryder, now 39

and feeling old, finds himself encamped near a house called Brideshead, a

place that serves as a catalyst for a dreamy return to post-WWI Britain, where

he tells of his first term at Oxford University and his taste of the academic,

the aesthetic, and the amoral.

He arrives as innocent as can be expected of a man near nineteen, and soon

accumulates friends within his college, with whom he discusses the academic

topics of the day. The dryness of these exchanges is suddenly displaced by

the introduction of Sebastian Flyte, who vomits into Charles' window one

evening, returning the next day to ask him to lunch. From the boredom of

typical academia, Charles encounters there the "flamboyant aesthetes," who

introduce him to their romantic tastes and poetic visions. He and Sebastian

quickly become friends henceforth, and the typical modern analysis would

assume a degree of homosexuality in their friendship.

** However, it is important to note that this story does not concern sexuality

as much as it does love, and moreover the existence of love between people

who have no real encounter with the opposite sex.

The foundation of the relationship established, the reader journeys with

Charles to his home at the end of his first term, where one finds his widower

father and the dry English manner that Waugh so obviously despises.

However, Charles and Sebastian are soon reunited, allowing Charles to see

more deeply into the lifestyle of Sebastian's rich, but more importanly

Catholic, family. Here, Waugh departs from the once saccharine tone of

summer friendship and pastoral bliss to encounter the darker side of

Brideshead Manor, a place that begins as a blissful heaven for Charles, but

one which quickly reveals its faults.

The combined complexes of guilt and desperation begin to tear at the

borders of Charles' once celestial vision of life through Sebastian, and the

reader joins in the agonizing turns taken in either characters' life. Sebastian's

family also emerges as a far more intricate puzzle than one expects from the

initial presentation. As the narrative progresses, Charles encounters life from

innocence to maturation, and the reader observes this progression as his

desperate attempt to reconnect with the youthful days enjoyed within the first

chapters. The novel reads as an excursion into a subculture Waugh clearly

experienced firsthand, and, like his earlier novels, seeks to expose the

failures of such cliques that seem so innocuous.

Later in the novel, one realizes that perhaps, as in life itself, one never really

knew the characters that one had grown to love. As the reader encounters

Brideshead by the end of the novel, there is a bitter air to the once beautiful

place, yet within the discovery of truth, there lies the initial beauty of life

itself, and the reader must imagine, as Charles himself does, that there is no

more happiness to be had than the enjoyment of recollection.

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