Ben Faxon
Final Essay Memo
The final essay will focus on corruption, as shown through desire and use of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings and its relation to assisting totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union. The essay will be centered around the terms “survive at any price” and “only material results matter” from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. It will compare the people who act “unethically” just to survive and those who act for power, not caring about what they leave behind. The essay will also reflect on Tolkien and Solzhenitsyn’s ideas about totalitarianism and discuss how their own lives may have influenced their beliefs.
Close Reading Pages:
- Pages 396-400, Boromir tries to get the ring from Frodo
- Pages 724-728, Sam learns of Gollum’s true motives
- Pages 1015 to 1020, Saruman and Wormtongue’s death
Research sources:
John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War
Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
Draft enthymeme thesis sentence:
Tolkien’s novel shows the problems that emerge from the existence of the One Ring and how some are affected differently, therefore showing the relation to the promise of power in totalitarian societies that is discussed in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literature.