Beyond Mere Style in Rasselas Anonymous College

Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which follows Rasselas and his companions as they search for the choice of life that generates the most happiness, influenced Johnson’s generation so profoundly that the period from 1750 to 1784 has been dubbed the “Age of Johnson.” Along with Johnson’s philosophical ruminations pondered in the course of this satirical moral apologue, Johnson’s writing was, and remains, renowned for its style. Writing with a paralleling Neoclassical structure, with periodic sentences that emphasize the last words of the sentences, and with constant negation, Johnson’s style became a distinguishing feature of his work and has inspired a slew of authors to use his techniques in their own work. Given the import centered on Johnson’s style by his contemporaries and modern audiences, one must question whether there is significance to Johnson’s techniques beyond mere writing style. Portraying paralleling incidents which foreshadow the novel’s inconclusive conclusion, emphasizing the weightiness of his novel’s ending which changes the novel’s entire argument, and negating the entire trajectory of Rasselas with his conclusion, Johnson constructs the novel’s events to mimic his literary...