《The Godfather》读后感1000字

《The Godfather》是一本由Mario Puzo著作，Arrow Books Ltd出版的Paperback图书，本书定价：GBP 7.99，页数：446，特精心收集的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

《The Godfather》读后感(一)：Meet Apollonia

“Hit with the thunderbolt”是西西里语，我没有查这个单词具体意思，但从词根上看，thunder是雷，因而这句话大意应该是像被雷击中一样。不知道这种猜想是否准确，但这都没有关系。因为我的理解就是那样的。

这句话出自The Godfather中，是指MichaelCorleone在西西里遇到Apollonia时他所感受到的。当时他正在流放中，一次远足时看到几位西西里少女在嘻戏，其中就有Apollonia，只一眼，她的美就使Michael“be hit by the thunderbolt”，这个不久前刚刚冷静地杀死了一个毒枭和一个警官的人现在呆呆地站在那里，感觉全身的血液都涌到了大脑中。她的美使他颤抖。书中写到，“他的生命变得简单了，只集中于一点，其他的一切都不再值得考虑。”他只想得到她，为此他愿意做任何事情，不惜杀死任何试图阻止他达到这一目的的人。

从看过的电影中我知道他的目的达到了，他得到了她，但不久又失去了。家族的仇杀使他最终成为了一个Don，但他失去了令他如此砰然心动的妻子。作者安排这样一个人物的出现是为了使Michael最终成为一个Don的性格发展显得更合理吗？果真如此的话，这一安排是多么残忍。如此令人怦然心动的美，却又如此脆弱！

很久都不再读小说，更是很久都没有为小说中的人物的命运而心动了。作为Godfather中的一个次要的人物，Apollonia使我也有了受雷击一般的感受，感受这不是一个虚构的生命，而是曾经发生在我们周围的真实。我甚至不敢再继续看下去，因为我知道，她的充满生机的美丽的躯体很快就要在一次爆炸中灰飞烟灭。那种慑入我们内心中的美是如此罕遇，而她的消失却会多么轻易多么彻底。

我想到了我自己，同无数生活于虚幻而快速的现代生活中的人一样，我终日营营，追逐眼前的浮浅的快乐而在真失的生活中迷失。我的眼睛变的近视，我的皮肤变得麻木，我的心灵变得迟钝。生活的生命的本义仿佛已经缺失。

《The Godfather》读后感(二)：一场胜仗就够了

读的英文版，本文人名和引用的文字都是自己翻译的，不准确的请见谅。

其实与其说是Michael完成了复仇，不如说是老科里昂假手于他的小儿子。老科里昂早就计划好了一切，他知道自己老了，无力再为Sony报仇。他也知道，Michael有能力继承家业，会完成他未竟的事业。科里昂家族地位的下降，不给Sony报仇被人瞧不起，这一切他都选择了隐忍。直到巴尔齐尼和塔塔格利亚家族觉得科里昂家族已经不足为惧，自己即将大获全胜的时候，Michael这一击就是致命的。正如Sony的死一样，Michael也趁对手放松了警惕的时候干净利落地外破强敌，内除叛徒。

复仇的那一段写得很简洁，区区几页，倒是关于露西•曼齐尼和强尼方丹的情节交代得很多。正是在这种表面上的平静下，酝酿着大风大浪。也正因如此，Michael像君临天下的罗马皇帝那样接受“Don Michael”的称号时，才显得格外震撼。

Sony注定成不了科里昂家族事业的继承人。或许他在局部的斗争中取得了很多胜利，但都没有Michael这一次来得有效。那些无关大局的胜利，最后害了Sony自己。

或许，Sony打卡洛里齐为妹妹出气是作者埋下的伏笔。Sony有任侠心肠，他不肯打没有还手之力的人。而最终出卖他的正是卡洛里齐。而Michael即使对家族的功臣特西奥也不留情面，卡洛里齐的死写得如在目前，甚至有些让人不舒服，对于特西奥，则只写了保镖带他进车和哈根“感觉有点不适”.一详一略，高明之至。

马里奥普佐在最后一章借汤姆哈根之口道出了真谛：“背叛不能被原谅。迈克尔可以宽恕背叛，但人们永远不会宽恕自己，所以他们永远危险。迈克尔真的喜欢特西奥。他爱他的妹妹。但如果他放过卡洛和特西奥，他就是在逃避对你，对他的孩子，对他整个家庭，对我和我的家庭的责任。”

Michael比起Sony正是聪明在他没有给他的敌人留下余地，所以一场胜仗就够了。

凯伊最后在汤姆哈根的开导下理解了Michael, 而对读者来说，黑手党那一切让人不舒服的行为，也不在陌生了。尽管选择的道路不同，黑手党的一切却都在影射着整个社会，既有光明，也有黑暗。每个人内心的黑暗。

《The Godfather》读后感(三)：The Men in The Godfather as Victims of Patriarchy

As a work of mafia theme, The Godfather explicitly creates a patriarchy world where men undergo fierce competitions with each other in a masculine way: shrewdly, decisively, cold-heartedly, while women are strictly excluded outside the business. Thus through researches on male characters’ life experiences, psychological conditions, crime philosophy, life principles, and Sicilian culture codes conveyed in their behaviors, numerous studies on the male protagonists, like Gardaphé (2003) and Cawelti (1998), have investigated how the their personalities and strategies facilitate or hinder their career. Meanwhile, other critics like Sun (2007) and Torgovnick (1988) acknowledge the mafia system as a world of male domination where men benefit from the bloody competitions, as opposite to which the female characters descent to the second-class civilians and become victims of domestic patriarchy as well as of men’s hot pursuit of profit and power in business. However, these critics fail to discover the fact that patriarchy system, as the foundation of the cruel battles among men and their constant ignorance of women, is not simply the roots of women’s bitterness. Contrary to the common expectation that the masculine mafia system ensures men’s dominance and interest, their life and happiness actually are also severely undermined by patriarchy.

Although the mafia patriarchy system endows men with priority over women, it neither provides every one of them with the equal access to its benefits, nor with enough benefits to go around. This flaw evokes brutal competition among men, which likely to escalate to an endless appraisal of violence, involving the males facing with death directly. In her monograph Feminism and International Relations, Li Yingtao stresses that “the root of war and violence is the worship of patriarchy and imperialism” (125). In the novel, this thesis is proved elaborated at great length. The men of the mafia families are brought up witnessing crimes and murders, and informed of the necessity of toughness to survive the unfeeling lifestyle. As they grow into adults, they mostly resort to violence as solution to variable problems: Tom Hagen succeeds in forcing the Hollywood director Woltz to give Johnny Fontane the leading role in his new movie by beheading Woltz’s beloved horse and placing the head right beside the soundly sleeping director; Sonny beats Carlo up for revenge of his sister under Carlo’s abuse, while later Carlo takes his brother-in-law’s life in return by an evil trick together with the opponent families. Throughout the story, the five mafia families point their guns at people standing in the way of their business. In order to get rid of the old Don who is against their drug plan, Sollozzo and his supporters try to assassinate Vito Corleone, intending to cooperate with his successor, Sonny, who is in favor of the plan. Although being the first victim, Vito is the luckiest one—he survives after all. Hundreds of leaders, business companions, Consiglioris, massagers (who actually take the job for a living rather than death) and even a corrupted police officer become victims of the horribly large-scaled “attrition” Sonny “embarks on” (345). Ironically, it is Sonny’s own death that puts an end to the bloody fight. The terrible fight that makes five family bleed into river does not produce a winner. With the loss of sons or fathers or brothers in each family, everyone becomes a loser. The collective failure among New York mafia world is a demonstration that the patriarchy mafia system, as an epitome of the male chauvinism, eliminates the honesty, kindness and trust, defines the relationship of people as the cold-blooded rivalry, turns people “into an artificial monster”, and creates countless casualties and irremediable hurt on everybody (Wollstonecraft 9). Unfortunately, in the novel the author states that within every five years among the five mafia families in New York, the temporal interval of peace is broken when a new war for power redistribution is break out.

With the whole family to feed and protect, the honor of the family to inherit and hand down, the patriarchy system also inevitablly imposes tremendous “harness” of “gender expectations” on men’s backs: to be “the heroes, the studs, the providers, the warriors, the empire builders, [and] the fearless ones”; to contain “male” characteristics such as reason, shrewdness, strength in themselves and remove “female” characteristics like impulsiveness, innocence, fragility; and to “lose touch with, or run away from their feelings and awareness of themselves as people” (Goldberg 307-08). But not all men are able to fulfill such an almost-divine role. Freddie, attracted by the thrills of mafia business and encouraged by the loyalty to the family, actively participates in the mafia business. But those requirements are far beyond the craven, dull and weak-willed second son. When Don Corleone is shot on the street, Freddie as the only companion of his father only “stare[s] at his father’s body [. . .], [goes] into physical shock,” then is “led to the curbstone and [is] made sit down on it.” In the end he weeps “openly,” too deep in shock to answer any question by the police. During the whole event he even does not pull out his gun! Lacking the capacity to confront the challenges, he is sent to Las Vegas far away from the centre of business by his younger brother Michael, the new Don. Taking the arrangement as contempt against him, he addicts to new luxury life and becomes a womanizer and coward, screwing up all the tasks Michael gave him. So is Sonny. He is short-tempered, impulsive, and lacks his father’s “strategical genius” (345). It is his fatal impropriate interruption in the conversation between Vito and Sollozzo that gives his father away and triggers the whole bloody course. When dealing with the crisis, his rudeness intensifies the strife again and again until it finally claims him. These two brothers just prove what Goldberg points out: “in many subtle and direct ways, man is severely punished when he steps out of [the harness].” (308) Judging from an average standard, Freddie and Sonny are both good men. Freddie is kind and generous, and Sonny is brave and honest. But by standard of the mafia patriarchy system, their kindness, generosity, brave heart and honesty become impropriate and useless. Unless they overcome these so-called shortcomings of their characterisrics or succeeds in hiding them, they cannot avoid the doomed fate of failure. Like Freddie, and Sonny, for the majority of the losers in the mafia world, the elements that exist and remain more or less in their traits are unsuitable to the “harness” requirements of. On the other hand, the winners manage to gain the battle at the cost of their innocence, their love, their relatives, their happiness, their health and their dreams. Like Michael, who used to get away from family business and intend to integrate in the main trend of American society, not only loses his first wife in an assassination, but also the admiration and trust of his second wife after she finds him a murderer.

So what’s the solution to men’s dilemma？ Since the patriarchy system brings immense harm to both men and women, to break it is the key. On this account a reconsideration of women’s status, behaviors and values is an essence. For one thing, women are more in favor of friendship and charity. According to Shulamith Firestone, “women are excluded from the centre of culture, but their experience still remains in direct contact with it” (156). They suffer much more from the conflicts and wars in history than those who have the right to declare it: it is them who have to bear the difficult days after losing their husbands and sons, and become down and out at the aftermath of wars, so that they are eager to peace (156-69).In the novel, the friendship between women always remain and grow by doing away with the bad influence of the disputes between their male relatives on both part. For example, in spite that Vito Corleone and Amerigo Bonasera stop mutual visit for years because of their different beliefs in American society, Mama Corleone remains to be the best friend of Mrs. Bonasera as well as the godmother of the Bonaseras’ daughter; taking into the harmonious sisterhood with Connie, Kay once tried to persuade her husband Michael out of the intention to revenge at Connie’s husband for Sonny. If the mafia families at least adopted some soft methods of female, they would commence to step out of the vicious circle where people try to protect their interest in vain by a violent spiral, reaching agreements and becoming winners through negotiations and proper concessions. For another, women deserve to be included as “insiders” and share responsibilities with men. More than the passive bearers of their male relatives’ deeds, women also provide “raw material [and] fuels” for their “machine of culture” (Firestone 156). Directly or indirectly, their fates determine those of men’s, and men have sensed it so that they often get women involved in as tools. Take Connie as an example, her story in the novel is a process of being taken advantaged by different groups. Her wedding provides Amerigo Bonasera, Nazorine and Luca Brasi with excellent opportunities to ask favor from her father, the old Don, because it is a Sicilian tradition not to refuse others’ requests on the wedding day of one’s daughter. The Don promises to do them all the favors, not realizing that all of them would have a crucial role to back up him in the coming storm. As is mentioned above, Connie’s marriage problem is another tool for the enemies to damage Corleone family. Even her son’s Baptist is chosen by Michael as a day of massacre of the foes, after which the Corleone regained and reinforced its leading position. But women’s values in the mafia world do not stay in the level of being a useful tool. With courage and witty in them, women are proved to have the same ability as men to fulfill the task. When crunches come, women even serve as protectors of men. When Michael visits his father in hospital, only to find that all the body guards for the Don are dismissed by the corrupted police officer Captain McCluskey, it is a young nurse rather than a strong male doctor who helps Michael transfer Vito to a safety where he escaped from Sollozzo’s second assassination attempt. Mario Pozo here does not coincidentally arrange this female character. What he wants to show is the tenacity and power of women at critical time (Sun 74). Kay’s refusal to give Michael away when she is under police’s inquiry for Michael’s murder of Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey is also an admirable “practice of the New England omertà”—after all she’s only a twenty-year-old girl brought up in Yankee spirits (Torgovnick 1988). However, cocky men who try best to assert their status of protectors refuse to acknowledge these precious values of women. Locking women in their own garage, men in the mafia families lose the best resource of support.

Through a callous and heartless mafia patriarchy system the Corleone finally establishes its absolute authority in New York mafia world. But contrary to expectation, this does not bring happiness and satisfaction to the men of the family, even to the Don, Michael, himself. Not only do women in The Godfather suffer from the old patriarchy system, every man seems a victim of the cruel and unreasonable patriarchy system to some extent. The happiness of the majority of men, regardless of wealth or status, is destroyed. Men cannot achieve success and happiness until they change their conventional discrimination against women, discover women’s value, learn from the female, and share the world equally with them. It is not for the benefit of a single sex, but for both.

Works Cited

Cawelti, John G. “The New Mythology of Crime on Contemporary Literary Criticism.” Detroit: Gale Research (1998): 325-57

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dalectic of Sex : the Case for Feminist Revolution New York: Bantam (1971): 156-69

Gardaphé, Fred. “Re-Inventing Sicily in Italian American Writing and Film.” MELUS 28(3) (2003 Autumn): 55-71

Goldberg, Herb. “In Harness: The Male Condition.” The Hazards of Being Male New York: Norton, 1992. 307-13.

Li, Yingtao李英桃. Nvxing Zhuyi Yu Guoji Guanxi Xue女性主义国际关系学(Feminism and International Relations) 杭州：浙江人民出版社 (2006) Hangzhou: Zhejiang People (2006): 125

Pozo, Mario. The Godfather London: Arrow (2007)

Sun, Jinyi 孙晋一. Lun Dianying Jiaofu Zhong De Nvxing Juese 论电影《教父》中的女性角色 (“On the Women Characters in the Movie The Godfather.”) Dianying Pingjie 电影评介Movie Review Vol21, (2007): 73-4

Torgovnick, Marianna De Marco. “The Godfather as the World's Most Typical Novel.” South Atlantic Quarterly 87(2) (1988 Spring): 329-53

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and a Vindication of the Rights of Women Cambridge: Cambridge UP (1995): 9