Tarzan Alive Summary
Philip José Farmer

Tarzan Alive Summary

Burroughs (1875-1950) wrote serviceable prose at best, but what he lacked in style, he more than compensated for in sheer invention. He possessed a powerful and vivid imagination, and with it, he created the fantasy of a primitive being concealed inside ourselves: an absolutely good hero dominating a world of savagery and beauty.

Moreover, Burroughs also had a coherent vision of life. Like most mythic literature, his Tarzan books are about what a thing man is, how like an ape and how like an angel.

Burroughs's world view, as revealed in the Tarzan novels, coincides closely enough with Farmer's to account for two of the three major themes of Tarzan Alive. First, like Burroughs's Tarzan, Farmer's Tarzan must discover that he is more than an ape. He has a survival ethic unrestrained by sentimentality or a feeling of community and a capacity for violence uninhabited by conventional morality...

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