Essay Questions

Why does Paul fake his own death?

Paul has already suffered a social death in many ways, given that he is a convicted felon with a human trafficking conviction on his record. It is not going to be easy for him to put that behind him especially when so many of his peers are actually actively working against international prostitution.

Faking his own death gives him a new start, and he doesn't even have to go to the trouble of creating a new identity because he presents himself as his own cousin, with the same name. It is almost as though he can re-write his own history and learn from his mistakes without having to carry them with him as his life moves on.

What was Waugh's intention when writing the book?

The foremost intention that Waugh had in the writing of the book was to entertain. He meant the book to be funny, and even its most biting satire is not intended to be cruel. This changed as he grew older; his later work shows a vein of spite that is extremely obvious, but the outlandish nature of some of the plot in this first of his novels does suggest that humor was the number one intention of the author.

Waugh also intended to poke a little fun at what he considered to be societal confusion as he felt that the wrong people were setting the moral tone for the country and that the wrong things were found to be immoral. The novel is based loosely on his own experiences in college and in his first teaching position in a Welsh boarding school and so it is written in a satirical fashion that is almost poking fun at himself.