Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Erewhon oder Über die Gebirgskette
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love dry humour, travellers' tales and ideas turned inside out to be looked at fresh, with satire about religion, money, schooling, health and science.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Erewhon is a satirical novel by Samuel Butler, published without his name in 1872. It tells of a young Englishman who leaves home to make his fortune as a sheep farmer in a faraway colony. He crosses a great mountain range into a country no European has seen. There he finds a people who are tall, handsome and healthy, and whose laws turn the habits of Victorian England upside down.
Butler had spent several years farming sheep in the hills of New Zealand, and the opening chapters draw on that life. The rest of the book is invention, and it is full of jokes. The name of the land is nowhere spelled almost backwards, and that tells you what kind of place it is. In Erewhon, illness is a crime and crime is an illness. Banks hold money nobody spends, colleges teach things nobody needs, and machines are banned for fear that they will one day rule.
You get a travel story, a love story and a sharp argument about religion, money, schooling, health and science. Butler wrote partly in answer to the new ideas of Charles Darwin, and some of his strangest chapters play with them. The book is short enough to enjoy in a few evenings. Let us begin where the traveller begins, in the high country of a young colony, with an empty purse and a dream of getting rich.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1A young man goes looking for sheep countryFree
- 2The pass is guarded by singing statues
- 3Strangers are searched, tested and taken in
- 4Sickness is a crime and crime is a cure
- 5The Musical Banks and the goddess Ydgrun
- 6The Colleges of Unreason teach nothing useful
- 7The Book of the Machines argues for destruction
- 8Animals, vegetables and the unborn have rights
- 9What the satire is really about and how it is told
Punkt 1 von 9
A young man goes looking for sheep country
The story is told by a young Englishman whose name is hardly used. He has left home for a new colony, which the book never names but which readers have long taken to be New Zealand. He hopes to find good grazing land, take up a sheep run and grow rich. The early chapters describe this life with real knowledge, because Butler had lived it.
The narrator takes a post on a sheep station among the foothills. He works hard, learns the country and listens to talk of the great mountain range that shuts in the valley. Beyond it, the shepherds say, lies land that nobody has mapped. The thought of empty pasture that no other farmer has claimed excites him far more than his wages do.
He is not a wise explorer. He is ambitious, a little vain and quite sure of his own good sense. This matters, because the narrator is also the butt of Butler's humour. He judges the strange people he meets by English standards, and he rarely sees how odd those standards are.
He decides to go beyond the range. For this he needs a guide, and he finds one in an older man named Chowbok, who is a native of the country and a hired hand on the station. Chowbok knows the rivers and ridges. He is also deeply uneasy about where the young man wants to go, and he says little about the reason.
The two set off with supplies and a plan to push into the unknown valleys. The tone at this stage is plain and almost like a real journal. That plainness is deliberate, since it makes the wonders that follow seem all the stranger. The reader is lulled into trust, then led over the mountains.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
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Questions about Erewhon oder Über die Gebirgskette
What is Erewhon about?
Erewhon is about a young Englishman who crosses a mountain range and finds a hidden country whose laws are the reverse of Victorian ones. Through it, Butler mocks English ideas about illness, religion, money, schooling and machines.
What does the name Erewhon mean?
Erewhon is almost the word nowhere spelled backwards, with two letters swapped to make it easier to say. It points to the old idea of Utopia, a name that also means no place.
Is Erewhon based on New Zealand?
The opening chapters draw on Butler's own years as a sheep farmer in the hills of New Zealand in the early 1860s. The land of Erewhon itself is invented, and its exact place is never given.
What is the Book of the Machines in Erewhon?
It is an extract inside the novel that argues machines are evolving and could one day rule humans. It explains why the Erewhonians destroyed their machines, and it is often read as an early warning about technology.
Is Erewhon hard to read?
No. The language is clear and the chapters are short. The main ideas about health, belief and technology are easy to follow today.