Vanity Fair is a book which is fantastic as well as rather critical. After reading it, I would like to say something about the critics about this novel.
Vanity Fair is written by English author William Makepeace Thackeray. Even before the last serial was published, critics hailed the work as a literary treasure. Although the critics were superlative in their praise, they expressed disappointment at the unremittingly dark portrayal of human nature, fearing he had taken his dismal metaphor too far. Thackeray responding to critics explained that he saw people for the most part "abominably foolish and selfish". The unhappy ending aimed to cause readers to look inward at their own shortcomings.
The subtitle, A Novel without a Hero, is apt because the characters are all flawed to a greater or lesser degree; even the most sympathetic have weaknesses, for example Captain Dobbin who is prone to vanity and melancholy. The human weaknesses Thackeray illustrates are mostly to do with greed, idleness, and snobbery, and the scheming, deceit and hypocrisy which mask them. None of the characters are wholly evil, though. Even Becky, who is amoral and cunning, is thrown on her own resources by poverty and its stigma (she is the daughter of an artist who is in debt). This tendency of Thackeray's to highlight faults in all of his characters displays his desire for a greater level of realism in his fiction compared to the rather unlikely or idealized people in many contemporary novels.
