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<title> The Collector </title>
In my opinion there are many themes in this book but I will only deal with two of them, namely: There are many ways of being rich and money cannot buy everything. These themes, or statements, are represented by the two main characters, Miranda and Caliban, who in a way also represent an independent person and today's society with its restrictive rules. I will try to show how, in my opinion, these two people by their actions and their way of thinking make it possible to distinguish between one kind and the other.

Miranda is an art student and loves living life to the fullest. As much as she apprechiates the beauty of art, the originality in people and freedom, she hates everything that is mass-produced, the "wanting-to-be-somebody-attitude" and people who are afraid of being themselves. In her diary from November 7th she writes: "I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing, I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart." 

Caliban, on the other hand, is her total opposite. He is a newly- rich clerk who collects butterflies and has no idea what life truly is about. His greatest wish is for Miranda to fall in love with him, and he believes that she will if he only can find a way to make her happy. Due to the fact that he is not used to meeting people and therefore does not know how to make contact with Miranda, he sees no other way of making this happen than to "collect" her like a butterfly and instead of pinning her to a paper in a glass frame, he locks her up in a cellar. 

Miranda sometimes referes to Caliban as "the Old Man of the Sea", who in her opinion represents a person who by his demands and rules limits and suffocates everything that is alive; but who can be conquered by another person's creativity. This way of looking at Caliban also represents how she looks at society in general; that is, she sees both him and society as something that limits a person instead of helps him or her develop.

To Miranda being rich does not include the fact of owning a great deal of money but to be rich within yourself. A person with a rich inside is, in Miranda's opinion, able to apprechiate things like art, music and love; wants to help other people to accomplish what he or she already has achieved and has a wish to make people understand what life really is about. Miranda loathes what she in her diary calls "the New People". These people are the newly rich who will buy wonderful pieces of art only for the sake of buying it; they will do it because the price indicates that the painting is something that "regular" poor people could not afford and not because they love or understand it. She writes:
"I hate them. I hate the uneducated and the ingorant... I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie."

As Miranda sees it, these people are the truly poor people. Seen from her point of view being poor means to lack ability and will to understand that art is not something you hung up on your wall just to show your friends how much money you have got; and that it does not mean that a person appreciates literature just by reading a book without reflecting over its message. Later on in her diary Miranda recalls what her friend G.P. has said to her: "The New People are still the poor people. Theirs is the new form of poverty. The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul.

Caliban has in comparison to Miranda a totally different way of looking upon things. He wants to please Miranda by doing every little thing she asks for. He does not understand that what she wants most, apart from her freedom, is for him to have a mind of his own and not obey her every wish. He does not understand

Finally I would like to sum up what I have written by saying that the way Miranda sees things is that what you are lies within yourself and that you therefore are how you act and how you look upon things in life and although she is locked up in a cellar and dies at the end of the book, she has not been defeated by Caliban, or society. To a person like Caliban losing his money would mean losing his whole identity.
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