The Ambassadors Analysis

From the moment he lands in Europe by himself, Strether experiences a sense of freedom that he hasn't felt in a long, long time. And that makes a lot of sense, since his usual life in Woollett, Mas...

For this novel, Henry James goes with a third-person limited omniscient narrator, meaning that he's talking in the third person, but he limits us to knowing only what Strether knows. And that works...

Usually in a Coming-of-Age story, the main character moves from adolescence into adulthood. But in The Ambassadors, Strether's goal is to recover some of the sense of possibility and wonder that he...

Ah, Henry James. How droll. Seriously, though, James' tone in this book is something you'd expect from someone at a swanky dinner party in…oh, let's just say…Paris, 1903. You know, the kind of...

Maybe sophisticated is putting it lightly. At the end of the day, Henry James' writing style is DIFFICULT. And it's not just because the dude writes some of the longest sentences you'll ever read....

The Ambassadors can refer to two main things in this book: Strether's mission to persuade Chad Newsome to come home, and Strether's tendency to spend most of his time doing things for other people....

At the end of this book, Strether has found out that Chad and Madame de Vionnet are having a sexual relationship and decides that he has to leave beautiful Paris pretty much immediately and head ba...

We ain't gonna lie: this book is a toughie. That's the long and the short of it. And speaking of long, check out one of James' opening sentences: "The same secret principle, however, that had promp...

Euro TripThe first thing we find out about our protagonist Strether is that he's come from America to England and is waiting for a person named Waymarsh whom he's not overly eager to see. It's pret...

The CallUsually in a "Quest" story, the main character starts off by feeling like there's something terrible going on that she or he has to fix. The issue with Strether, though, is that the guy i...

If The Ambassadors were your typical stage drama, Act I would be bookended by Strether's arrival in Europe and the arrival of Sarah Pocock. In this act, we first learn all about Strether's situatio...

Believe it or not, it wasn't until after he died that Henry James became recognized as one of the greatest novelists ever and his zillion-page books started getting assigned in high schools all ove...

There's not really any sex that happens in The Ambassadors. Not on stage, anyway. But there's enough hinting toward it for this book to deserve a PG 13 rating. For most of the story, Strether is co...

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