Vanity Fair读后感

Say Goodbye to Vanity Fair

Book Report of Vanity Fair

I’ve read a well-known novel, Vanity Fair, in the past three weeks. It’s really a wonderful novel, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

William Makepeace Thackeray, the famous British novelist, wrote the book. He was born on July, 18th, 1811 in India and passed away on December 24th, 1863, the day before Christmas, in London. His father died when he was four years old. After that his mother remarried a rich man, which not only made him able to travel and study in the Continents of Europe but also made him step into British high social class. He was good at exposing the darkness of British high social class and wrote many works about that, such as Vanity Fair, which was written from 1847 to 1848.

There are two main characters in the novel, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, and the whole story focuses on them. Becky, a beautiful, intelligent girl, is born in a poor family which is in low social class. She is cunning, selfish and tries her best to change her situation in improper and shameless ways. She tended to marry Joseph, Sedley. Look at the book, it reads “Rebecca (Becky) then had this thought: if Mr. Joseph is rich and unmarried, why should I not marry him? Though I must leave here in a week, I sha ll try my best to win him over.”(Page 8, paragraph 9) But she failed. After that she makes every effort to attract Rawdon Crawley, a young man from a rich family, and they get married. Finally her husband finds her relationship with another rich man and abandons her. Another important character, Amelia, on the other hand, is kind and pure. She falls in love with her husband John. After he dies, she still doesn` t want to remarry and has ignored the love from another excellent young man, Dobbin, for a long period. At last, Becky tells her that her love John once wanted Becky to run away with him and marry him. Amelia finally accepts Dobbin and lives a happy life with him.

After finishing reading the novel, I keep thinking that we should say goodbye to the “vanity fair”. Fame and money are important, but what` s more important is that we are living in a harmonious society. We shouldn’t give up any beauty of humanity instead of chasing in the “vanity fair”.

Becky is cunning and selfish. Even though Joseph is one of her old friends, she sells him horses at a high price. “Rebecca (Becky), measuring the value of the goods which she had for sale by Joseph’ s eagerness to purchase, as well as by the scarcity of the article, put upon her horses a price so prodigious as to make even the civilian draw back. And she insisted on selling them both or neither.”(Page 128, paragraph9) She did many cruel things like this. But finally her best friend keeps away from her. Her husband abandons her. Her son declines to see her. She does pay the price of chasing in the “vanity fair”, ending up with nothing. The “vanity fair” is a pompous world, and fame and money in it is just like beautiful clouds, easy to come but easy to disappear. We can never gain real happiness in the “vanity fair”. Even Becky has said to herself, “I wish I were out of it. I would rather be a person` s wife and teach a Sunday school than this.”(Page 212, paragraph 1) Can we be permanently happy with