The Alexandria Quartet Summary
Love, laughter, art, and the difficult struggle to break through to a fecundating tenderness and creativity may be described as Durrell's primary themes as well as his chief social concerns. Certainly the work is fundamentally a bildungsroman, and its basic thrust is the growth and education of its central character and narrator, Darley. This central quest — what Darley learns — carries him through, as Durrell writes, "the politics of love, the intrigue of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder," all of which move "obscurely in the dark corners" of Alexandria, move "like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counterplot." Slowly, with many visions and revisions, Darley learns love, and achieves maturity as man and artist.
Put more simply, the primary theme has to do with the quest to break through isolation and loneliness, to realize fullness of life... View more of the The Alexandria Quartet Summary
Study Pack
The The Alexandria Quartet Study Pack contains about 94 pages of study material in 9 products, including:
The Alexandria Quartet Short Guide
Lawrence Durrell Biography (5)
5,878 words, approx. 20 pages
Biography EssayA follower in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell explored in his novels the quintessential concerns of the twentieth century: space, time, consciousness, ...
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1,161 words, approx. 4 pages
A prolific British author, Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) wrote several large-scale, multi-volume series of novels as well as poetry, plays, short stories, and travel books. People and places of the Med...
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5,271 words, approx. 18 pages
Following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell explores in his novels the quintessential concerns of the twentieth century: space, time, consciousness, sexualit...
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4,042 words, approx. 14 pages
Lawrence George Durrell was born in India at Jullundur in the United Provinces, of an Irish mother, Louisa Florence Dixie Durrell, and a British civil-engineer father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell. The aut...
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5,567 words, approx. 19 pages
Until 1957 Lawrence Durrell was an ordinary disaffected Englishman with a passion for writing, seemingly destined to live his life in a series of remote Mediterranean isles in the shadow of his renown...
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Essays & Analysis (3)
1,072 words, approx. 4 pages
Critical Essay by Robert Martin Adams
When Darley settles down with Clea to live happily ever after, the reader is more likely to sigh in disappointment than in satisfaction: we had thought there was ...
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2,044 words, approx. 7 pages
Critical Essay by Jane Lagoudis Pinchin
[In The Alexandria Quartet Durrell paints a] fevered city, a dying city, a prodigal, stranger-loving, leaf-veined city. A city of deep resignation, of spiritual...
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549 words, approx. 2 pages
Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
Is "The Alexandria Quartet" as good as we all thought it was when we first read it more than 20 years ago? I wondered about this when I saw that Lawrenc...
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Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence (George) Durrell
