Bellow's own biographer mused, after the publication of "Ravelstein," "Who are the other great writers who have done anything like this in their eighties?" Frank Kermode summed up the problem: "Those who have had actual experience of old age are likely to be dead or very tired or just reluctant to discuss the matter with clever young interlocutors".
So Plato clearly thinks that dialectic remains possible, and his Stranger seems actively engaged in helping his young interlocutors practice and learn the techniques.
Although the Sophist and Statesman are dialogues, the interaction between the Stranger and his two young interlocutors seems rather different from that between Socrates and his interlocutors in the Socratic dialogues, including the Theaetetus.
"Although the job as Mayor is not an easy one, it is particularly hard when your beliefs are counter to the system you are employed by," Sanders confided in his young interlocutor.
But I would submit to my young gangsta interlocutor that those artists are relatively shocking — relative to the social norms of their day.
Their interlocutors include young liberals and bloggers, and the discussions, once considered impossible, have been friendly and informal.
When Alcibiades speaks in Plato's "Symposium", it is to lament his failure to persuade Socrates to have sex with him.Another young man, Meno, is Socrates's chosen interlocutor on the subject of virtue.
The second thread of the story concerns Nuzum's close, mostly platonic friendship with a rather mysterious young woman named Laura Patterson, who becomes his interlocutor and confessor in the matter of the Little Girl, and who, after a fashion, accompanies Nuzum through a long, brutal slide into drug abuse and hospitalization that seems to have no real cause unless the ghost somehow qualifies.
In Parmenides, the principal interlocutor (not Socrates he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides) subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms.
It is a struggle of ideas, played out around the world, and a figure like Ramadan, who can appeal to young Muslims on the basis of both group identity and tolerance, is a valuable interlocutor.
The narrator of this arresting début is a young Englishwoman living alone on the coast of Ireland, who speaks to an unspecified interlocutor as she goes about her daily life.
