The Thorn Birds.doc

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Colleen McCullough, a female Australian author. It made a clue to the love relationship between Maggie, the heroine of the novel, and father Ralph. Based on that, the author tried to reveal the vivid stories of the people from generation to generation who are belonging to the Cleary family. And in these stories, the lasting time span is almost half of a century. The Thorn Birds, describing a tragedy about love between Meggie and Ralph, has affected me a lot, not only by the roles in the novel, but also something deep behind the roles. I felt painful and helpless when reading the novel. It made me realize that people need to pay an unimageable cost in exchange of true love and all niceness. The first part of the novel has already implied that story is moving and tragic, which is the clue for reader to understand the meaning of the novel. There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. “For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.” I think this is what the author wanted to tell us through the novel about life. And most of the roles in this novel live as the thorn birds, searching their own thorn trees of emotion or enterprise, from the moment they leaved their nests. Ralph, a priest who attracted by the feminity of Meggie, fell in love with Meggie the first he met her. However, he gave both his body and soul to God, and lived to become a cardinal as the most important thing in his life. Therefore, in order to be promoted to be the Cardinal, he abandoned Meggie though he loved her from the deep bottom of his heart. But as a priest, he cant express his love. What he can do was to take care of Meggie just as a father or brother. His heart hurted and he became more and more painful as Meggie grew up, and finally he had to repulse Meggies love. Ralph thought his pain would fade as time goes by and if Meggie marred other people. On the contrary, he was wrong. In fact, people sometimes would face this situation, and for most of us, its very difficult to choose one from love and enterprise when you cannt have your cake and eat it too. I appreciate Ralphs enterprise, because he struggled for his dream all the time. How painful he was when abandoned his lover to achieve his dream. I dont think Ralphs choice was wrong. The love between Ralph and Meggie was bound to be a tragedy that they could not change it. In my opinion, Meggie, a strong-minded girl daring to love a perpon she shouldnt love, did the very best she could to pursue her free love. Both her life and love were unfortunate, but so unsubmissive she was that she went through all suffering. In this novel, I like Meggie best due to her tolerace, patience, grace and so on. And its Meggie that I show so much sympathy for. Meggie is more miserable than Ralph because she had to endure pain both physically and psychologically.Luke is so ugly a person that I cant help condemning him. He married Meggie just only because he wanted to buy a farm with Meggies heritage. He didnt know what love was and never loved Meggie and even when Meggie had trouble at the time she gave birth to a child, he didnt come to see her. I think his dream was also ugly because he sacrificed Meggies happiness to achiev