In an environment made up largely of
sordidness and wretchedness they had kept themselves unsullied and wholesome.
Doubtless they were sordid; and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from
sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests.
The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque
sordidness and rottenness of manhate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before.
To show Washington's moral growth, Wiencek considers it necessary to describe his life as a slave master in all its
sordidness and moral squalor.
The position is also characterized by dirt and
sordidness, e.g.
If James Austin, the editor of Fields's correspondence, is right that Davis "presented the sordid side of mid-century America as no one else in the Atlantic dared to do" Fields may have struggled to mediate this
sordidness in Davis's writing more than in that of any of the magazine's other contributors (Fields 370).
"In a bad time," Wallace Stevens remarks of the beggar, "It is not a question of captious repartee./ What has he that becomes his heart's strong core?" The beggar, he answers, "has his poverty and nothing more." But it behooves Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, to avoid the
sordidness of bare boards and an unlit theater.
The rest of the novel is an account of his hallucinations, a Goya-like tableau of the hunger and misery of the African poor in the countryside and the deprivation and
sordidness of their life after they converge on the cities in search of means of subsistence.
The Vietnam War, the growing
sordidness of politics, the exploding racial tensions--these were beyond our grasp.
"We are either captivated by her manufactured intersections and coincidences and swept up by her stylish prose, or else we become irritated by these brief and eccentric immersions into the most diverse kinds of
sordidness" ("Fiction" 152-53).
Romance removed all
sordidness in the relationship.
It mixes stentorian rhetoric with schoolboy profanities in an atmosphere of general
sordidness that recalls the gutter sublime of Henry Miller, although Kontio's approach is infinitely more ironic and self-doubting.
