/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21221475]

what are the most ridiculous moments in great books?

[Anonymous No.21221480]

>>21221475
>21221475
lmao, try The Laws by Plato. The audiobook is 25 hours long and they were supposed to have had the whole conversation in one go while they stopped to rest on their walk

[Anonymous No.21221486]

Ridiculous in a funny way, but I like the scene where Queequeg tries selling shrunken heads to the people of Nantucket as they leave church.

[Anonymous No.21221493]

>>21221475
That part in 2666 where they stuck a knife up a guy's ass in the prison showers. Doesn't sound so pleasant.

[Anonymous No.21221498]

>>21221480
Ancient Greeks were just that efficient orators.

[Anonymouṡ No.21221526]

>>21221475
— As I Lay Dying
Cash and his leg (concrete cast, etc). I know it's supposed to be absurd, but not THAT absurd.

— Wuthering Heights
It's great, but let's face it, she does go OTT on occasion. Heathcliff clutching Cathy to his bosom and gnashing his teeth at anyone who dares approach springs to mind.

>>21221486
>the scene where Queequeg tries selling shrunken heads to the people of Nantucket
Moby Dick is magnificent but as barmy as a box of frogs. Not sure that even makes the Top Ten Mad Moments. Almost all Ahab's dialogue is more ridiculous than that.

[Anonymous No.21221612]

>>21221475
Dostoevsky’s constant character monologues are truly ridiculous and put me to sleep every time.

[Anonymous No.21221617]

>>21221475
>size 10
you say that as if's small

[Anonymous No.21221636]

>>21221475
Oddyseus indulging his humiliation kink by getting fucked with as an old man at his own place with dudes waiting to fuck his wife.

[Anonymouṡ No.21221698]

>>21221475
A few more that spring to mind:

— As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice
Woman puts on a man's hat and instantly a) everyone thinks she's a man, b) heterosexual woman fall madly in love with her & c) her best friends don't recognize her.

— Dracula
Not exactly a "moment", more a series of moments. They work out pretty early on that Dracula is a vampire who wants to come and bite Mina. So all they have to do is, like, have someone turstworthy stay in her room at night? No, they mess up about six times in a row. It just gets farcical. YOU HAD ONE JOB.

>>21221612
The way Dmitri Karamazov carries on (beating brow, quaffing champagne, running about in a frenzy) gets a bit silly.

[Anonymouṡ No.21221707]

>>21221617
11 or 12 is normal for a novel these days, no?

[Anonymous No.21221712]

Most of Call of the Crocodile. Pic related.

[Anonymous No.21221823]

>>21221526
Cash’s leg is hilarious, Anse insisting on cementing it up because he already paid for the cement lmao, shit is too good

[Anonymous No.21221890]

>>21221493
>and another woman was found
>and another woman was found
>and another woman was found
>and another woman was found
>and another woman was found
>and another woman was found

[Anonymous No.21221901]

>stone sucking sequence in Molloy

[Anonymous No.21221908]

>>21221475
I know it is (probably) just the uncle making shit up to keep the kids entertained but I started Mason & Dixon this month and the Learnéd English Dog section as a whole was pretty baffling as someone who knew absolutely nothing about the book

[Anonymous No.21221924]

>>21221475
Tom Bombadil was a toal waste of time, and irrelevant to the rest of the book. Nowadays no well meaning editor would let their writer put out such quackery.

[Anonymous No.21222047]

>>21221924
We're just gonna kill 'em!
We're just gonna kill 'em!
I still can't believe he actually did this shit in real life

[Anonymous No.21222112]

I have my doubts the mid 19th century had such great prosthetics and make up that Edmond was able to pull all those disguises on people.

[Anonymous No.21222156]

>>21222047
"What inspires me is teaching African refugees how to program JavaScript."

[Anonymous No.21222171]

>>21221526
>I know it's supposed to be absurd
It's not. Would love to hear a justification for this awful opinion.

[Anonymous No.21222266]

>>21221924
Came here to say this

[Anonymous No.21222677]

Dimitri K talking about escaping to America growing a beard and shaving it off. Reminds me of spongebob

[Anonymous No.21222947]

>>21221924
>>21222047
>>21222156
>iPads built into every desk of every student
>teaching African refugees to program Javascript
>Ten dollar gas
How did he know?

[Anonymous No.21222966]

>>21221901
Giving his son an enema and describing the texture of what came out was pretty weird too. I guess that's in Malone Dies and not Molloy but whatever it's the trilogy.

[Anonymous No.21223074]

>>21221475
Dimitri K talking about escaping to America growing a beard and shaving it off. Reminds me of spongebob

[Anonymous No.21223278]

>>21221475
>Father Zosima hopelessly listening to Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov bickering about their petty bullshit

[Anonymous No.21223325]

>reading The Magic Mountain
>yet another 20 page series of dueling monologues between Settembrini and Naphta

[Anonymous No.21223341]

>>21221526
>as barmy as a box of frogs
>that kid who thinks he's a writer

[Anonymous No.21223363]

>>21221480
> The audiobook is 25 hours long and they were supposed to have had the whole conversation in one go while they stopped to rest on their walk

Pic related, I know the “Athenian Stranger” isn’t explicitly Socrates or Plato, but I could totally picture either of them stopping mid-journey and just rambling about philosophy nonstop for 25 hours lmao

[Anonymous No.21223368]

>>21221698
Can't blame the theater for absurdities when they're working on (1) constrained time/props and (2) expecting the audience to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot. Another Shakespeare absurdity could be argued in Romeo & Juliet where Romeo and his gang walk to the Capulet Manor, which is understood to be a long night's walking distance but is completed by everyone walking from one side of the stage to the other, with only so much dialogue in between.

[Anonymous No.21223394]

The Count switching outfits in key moments to reveal his true identity, or switch to one of his aliases is ridiculous at times

[Anonymous No.21223662]

>>21222966
The enema is in the Moran section (Part 2) of Molloy, the detective who's getting ready to go out and look for Molloy. Malone Dies is about the failed writer in the sanatorium trying to write out the things in his mind (Beckett's writer characters always tap into the gallery of other characters in Beckett's works, so you have Malone thinking of Molloy, Moran, Krapp on the boat (the same memory Krapp has in his own voice memo), and a few others I can't remember right now).

[Anonymous No.21223720]

>>21221475
I can only imagine the disgust on Ehud's face when he smells Eglon's feces. The hero of the people kills the oppressor and the first thing he does is wrinkle his nose, try to pluck his sword out of blubber unsuccessfully, and then leaves.

[Anonymous No.21223732]

>>21221612
What i love most about Russian Literature is the long winded self deprecation by these wretches, unable to stop being complete wretches!

[Anonymous No.21223829]

>>21221480
25 hours in English. Ancient Greek is hyper efficient and that whole thing was simply a 30 minute exchange for them.

[Anonymous No.21223956]

>>21223829
This. The complete works of Plato is like 50 pages in Greek.

[Anonymous No.21224173]

>>21223325
You can't tell me you didn't enjoy those.

[Anonymous No.21224405]

>>21221475
The philosophical rambles by strangers in The Crossing, and in McCarthy thereafter. All fantastic though. They are like stream of consciousness soliloquies by a writer who usually avoids internality.

[Anonymous No.21224462]

>>21221475
Dostoevsky books often have comedic moments and I wonder if they are intentional or not. For example in Underground man
>*opens door*
>says nothing for 5 minutes
>...where is my money underground man
>says nothing for 5 minutes
>leaves

[Anonymous No.21224594]

>>21221475
Frank Herbert's breeding fetish, read all 6 of Dune series. He keeps repeating himself about sex and breeding. Everyone being 140+ IQ super humans and speak like autists. also focus on bodily functions.

[Anonymous No.21224630]

The murder flashback sections of Berlin Alexanderplatz that retell the exact same thing but in different styles throughout the book, and some times they are so nonsensically written you'll reach the end of the paragraph and go "oh, it was the murder scene again."

[Anonymous No.21224704]

>>21221475
Chapter 11, Portrait of Dorian Grey is a Wikipedia article on the history of jewelry and perfume.

[Anonymous No.21224712]

>>21221475
Ulysses tranny fistfucking scene in the Circe chapter caught me by surprise ngl

[Anonymous No.21224714]

I quite liked the Marmalade tangent. It gave the reader an insight as to what absolute poverty is and how vulnerable and pathetic people are.

[Anonymous No.21226284]

>>21221475
>vaginal surgery arc in the Godfather
>cannibal/space flight arc in Forrest Gump
>anti-fornication chapter in Deus Irae
>/ss/ in Heretics of Dune
>hooker murder mystery in Nightside of the Long Sun
>don't do this and that chapter in Harassment Architecture
>nigga moment in Farnham's Freehold
>Dracula's castle arc in Call of the Crocodile

[Anonymous No.21226299]

>>21226284
>/ss/ in Heretics of Dune
wtf where?

[Anonymous No.21226318]

>>21226299
That part when the ghola gets his powers with Bene Gesserit sex techniques... That was actually in Chapterhouse, wasn't it?

[Anonymous No.21226357]

>>21224462
>marmeladov gets trampled by the horse
>marmeladov's wife prepares a lunch after husband's funeral
>some random old deaf man turns up whom nobody knows
I thought it was extremely amusing
also
>dostoevsky describing how the jew paid prisoners to rub his back in the sauna
pure fucking comedy

[Anonymous No.21226402]

>>21221924
Literally the best part of the whole series.

[Anonymous No.21226433]

>>21226284
Sounds funny

[Anonymous No.21226909]

>>21221486
Nah, the Indian Tashteego nailing the flag to the topmast of the Pequod just as it disappears under the waves and everyone drowns...give me a motherfucking break, like what in the world is this shit? Actual, honest-to-god Rian Johnson "Rise of Skywalker" type bullshit, literal bathos nonsense in the second to last scene of the greatest American novel of all time.

I go through hundreds of pages of Melville wanking off his mind-cock, pages and pages of him flexing about the mythology of the color white, cetology, whalers are G.O.A.T.'s and St. George was actually slaying a whale not a dragon, the pointless story about the Steelkilt mutiny, "squeeze squeeze SQUEEZE!", on and on and on...and when he finally remembers he has an actual STORY to tell, he finishes it in 20 pages with some Pirates of the Caribbean bullshit.

FUCK YOU MELVILLE.

[Anonymous No.21226930]

>>21224462
there's definitely an inherent absurdity in a lot of dosto's work that i think lends well to his philosophical themes.

[Anonymous No.21227097]

>>21226284
>vaginal surgery arc in the Godfather
I never understood that either. Why was it in the book? Who wanted to read about it? It added nothing and she was already a very minor character. I want to read about mafia plots and intrigue, not how big her vagina is and only Sonny could satisfy her before the surgery. The book had some very detailed sex scenes I could have lived without

[Anonymous No.21227179]

>>21226357
The funeral lunch had me dying. The German landlord throws them out and the widow has her children dancing in the streets.

[Anonymous No.21227183]

>>21224712
Bloom giving birth was weirder

[Anonymous No.21227195]

Honestly Achilles chasing Hector around Troy, despite how awesome the imagery is, gets a little looney tunes when its happening 7 fucking times.