Approaches to narrative and character in British and

American literature- the realist, modernist and

postmodernist paradigms In American literature, the
term "realism" encompasses the period of time from
the Civil War to the turn of the century during which
William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis,
Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction
devoted to accurate representation and an
exploration of American lives in various contexts. As
the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War,
the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the
rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an
expanding population base due to immigration, and
a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a
fertile literary environment for readers interested in
understanding these rapid shifts in culture. The
realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed
in the twentieth century. Though Twain produced
other well-read works in the intervening years, It
was the emergence of Huckleberry Finn in 1885 that
established him as a pillar of realism. Actually begun
before The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, this first
person narrative of an orphan boy and a runaway
slave had a profound effect on the future of
American literature. Twain showed the moral
decrepitude of slavery and racism in vivid color. He
did so not by preaching, but by portraying the world

as it really was. His characters speak like real

people and sound distinctively American, using local
dialects, newly invented words, and regional
accents. He portrayed uniquely American subjects
in a humorous and colloquial, yet poetic, language.
His success in creating this plain but evocative
language precipitated the end of American
reverence for British and European culture and for
the more formal language associated with those
traditions. Henry James has had a tremendous
influence on the development of the novel. Part of
this influence has been through the type of realism
that he employs. James' realism is of a special sort.
By the early definitions, James is not a realist. The
early definitions stated that the novelist should
accurately depict life and that the novel should hold
up a mirror to life; in other words, the realist was
supposed to make an almost scientific record of life.
But James was not concerned with all aspects of
life. There is nothing of the ugly, the vulgar, the
common, or the pornographic in James. He was not
concerned with poverty or with the middle class who
had to struggle for a living. Instead, he was
interested in depicting a class of people who could
afford to devote themselves to the refinements of
life. In terms of his world, he never violates his
character's essential nature. Thus, James' realism,

in the truest sense, means being faithful to his

character. In other words, characters from other
novels often do things or commit acts that don't
seem to blend in with their essential nature. But the
acts of the Jamesian character are always
understandable in terms of that character's true
nature. When James creates a certain type of
character early in the novel, this character will act in
a consistent manner throughout the entire book.
This is being realistic. The character will never do
anything that is not logical and acceptable to his
realistic nature, or to our conception of what that
character should do. Writing about realism in later
years, James maintained that he was more
interested in a faithful rendition of a character in any
given situation than in depicting all aspects of life.
Modernism as a literary movement reached its
height in Europe between 1910 and 1920, and
addressed aesthetic problems similar to those found
in non-literary forms of contemporaneous. The
general thematic concerns of Modernist literature
are well-summarized by the sociologist Georg
Simmel: "The deepest problems of modern life
derive from the claim of the individual to preserve
the autonomy and individuality of his existence in
the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical
heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of

life." Through an aesthetic examination of these and

related concerns, Modernist literature developed a
style that can be characterized by a preoccupation
with stylistic novelty, formal fragmentation, multiple
perspectives, and alternatives to traditional narrative
forms. Modernist literature involved such authors as
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner,
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Modernist
literature attempted to move from the bonds of
Realist literature and introduce concepts such as
disjointed timeliness. Modernism was distinguished
by emancipatory meta narrative. In the wake of
Modernism,
and
post-enlightenment,
meta
narratives tended to be emancipatory, whereas
beforehand this was not a consistent characteristic.
Modernist literature often features a marked
pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism
apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common
motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated
individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to
make sense of a predominantly urban and
fragmented society". Woolf believed women
processed information differently and expressed
themselves differently. Woolf insisted that women,
given the freedom to write as they think and speak,
would give rise to a new narrative form: a female
narrative. At the time that Woolf proposed this idea;

Victorian society was clearly defined by two

spheres, the masculine sphere which involved
politics and commerce, and the feminine sphere of
the home and family. Gender roles and experience
were strictly segregated, which lends credibility to
Woolf's argument, and we certainly see evidence of
this emerging 'voice' when we compare the works of
Virginia Woolf with another contemporary, James
Joyce. James Joyce, like Woolf, utilized a method
known as stream of consciousness, a narrative
method that allows the free flow of thoughts,
sensations, and associations at multiple levels of
awareness. Stream of consciousness focuses on
the inner reality of characters rather than external
events. By exposing the psychological realm of a
character, modernist writers were able to address
perception. This was the perfect vehicle for Woolf's
'female narrative'. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (1916) is a semi-autobiographical novel of
adolescence, or Bildungsroman. A sensitive and
artistic young man, Stephen Dedalus is shaped by
his environment but at the same time rebels against
it. He rejects his father, family, and religion, and, like
Joyce, decides at the novels close to leave Ireland.
He states as the reason for his exile his mission to
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race. The heros symbolic name is

drawn from Ovid Dedalus, the artificer who made

wings on which his son flew too near the sun,
melting their wax and causing him to plunge into the
sea. For Joyce and others after him, Dedalus
became a symbol for the artist, and the hero,
Stephen, appears again in Ulysses (1922). Joyce's
portrait of the artist in adolescence is like a painting,
showing the hero in his immaturity, still seeking his
identity. His major flaw, the failure to love, is shown
by Stephen's isolation, his inability to immerse
himself in life. The hero's declaration, 'I will not
serve' links him with another soaring figure, Lucifer,
whose sin of pride also precluded the possibility of
love, which for Joyce (always doctrinally orthodox)
represented the greatest of all the Christian virtues
and the most humanizing. Fitzgerald's ambitious
goal as he approached the composition of The
Great Gatsby was to "write something new-something extraordinary and beautiful and simple
intricately patterned." And it is indeed largely
because of his concern with matters of form aimed
at simplicity and intricacy of pattern that the novel
succeeds on so many levels: the simplicity, or
apparent simplicity, of Nick Carraway's first-person
viewpoint, allows the reader, on the one hand, to
see how the narrative is being constructed and, on
the other, to participate in Nick's sense of discovery

as the separate strands of the narrative take on

meaning at various levels of abstraction in such a
way that they seem, both to Nick and to the reader,
to have been inseparably linked from the beginning.
There was, of course, nothing new about firstperson narration in the 1920's. An exploration of key
passages in both This Side of Paradise and The
Great Gatsby allows for an exploration of
Fitzgerald's engagement with ideas regarding
hierarchies and how knowledge of them shapes
identities. In both, Fitzgerald touches on identity
constmction and class; important psychological and
social issues that nm through both texts and the
novels pivot on the fundamentally arbifrary
distinctions made between people within society.
The short story, The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber was also published during the 1930's.
This story is not as clear with an external force that
dooms. While it contains many tragic elements and
ultimately illustrates Hemingway's tragic vision of
man, it does not use the war as the dooming
external force. It can be argued that society's view
of the man before and after the war as one of
courage and bravery, ultimately brings death upon
Macomber. Throughout the story, his wife constantly
refers to him as a coward, and when he does not
act bravely, physically engages with the professional

hunter, Wilson, who does exhibit courage. After

Wilson killed the lion, Hemingway writes, While
they sat there his wife ha reached forward and put
her hand on Wilson's shoulder. He turned and she
had leaned forward over the low seat and kissed
him on the mouth(138). Because Francis does not
act bravely, his wife reaches out towards another
man who does. While Francis is not doomed by the
external forces of the war, he is doomed by the
societal conception of a man as brave and
courageous which can be related to the war.
Continuing the narrative experiments of the
modernists, the first generation of postmodernists,
American and British writers of the 1960s and 1970s
"metafiction" (Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas
Pynchon, John Fowles, and Angela Carter),
produced texts that simultaneously questioned and
violated the conventions of traditional narrative. The
fragmentation, intertextuality, and discontinuity that
characterize so much of experimental modernist
and postmodernist literature find a kind of fulfillment
in the inherently fragmented, intertextual, and
discontinuous form of "hypertext," a computergenerated Web text with multiple branching links.
Fowles's originality, versatility and skill were
nowhere more evident than in his most celebrated
novels, among them "The Collector," "The Magus"

and "The French Lieutenant's Woman." In "The

French Lieutenant's Woman," for example, he
combined the melodrama of a 19th-century
Victorian novel with the sensibility of a 20th-century
postmodern narrator, offering his readers two
alternative endings from which to choose and at one
point boldly inserting himself into the book as a
character who accompanies the hero on a train to
London. Fowles rejection of the posture of
omniscient narrator exhorted both characters and
readers to grapple with possibilities and to grow
through the pursuance of mystery which pours
energy into whoever seeks the answer to it. The
very idea of putting Lord of the Flies into a social
and historical context seems, at first, absurd. After
all, it is a deliberately mythic novel, almost as
abstract as it is possible for a work of fiction to be.
The setting is never identified. It could be almost
any small island in the tropics. The characters,
except for Jack (and Percival Wemys Madison,
whose last name exists solely as a symbol of lost
civilization) have no surnames; many of them,
including most of the littluns and choirboys, do not
even merit first names. The war that brings them to
the island in the first place is mentioned only briefly.
The remarkable thing is that, despite being very
much a product of its place and time, full of dated

schoolboy slang and cold war anxiety, Lord of the

Flies remains an influential and powerful
commentary on human evil. In part this is because it
explores some of the most intense urges and
emotions in our repertoire: the desire for power, the
fear of the unknown, fear of other people, anger,
and jealousy. In short, this novel asks hard
questions about what Golding, taking a cue from
Conrad, calls "the darkness of man's heart. Short,
straightforward in narrative, and relatively linear in
plot, The Crying of Lot 49 is considered by many to
be Pynchon's most accessible novel, On the most
basic level, The Crying of Lot 49 can be read as an
intellectual thriller or a postmodern mystery. The
narrative is consistent, the plot moves along rapidly,
and the point of view remains stable. Even after
several readings one finds that the novel
deliberately evades solutions -- indeed, this is one
of the hallmarks of Pynchon's unique style. At the
core level, the book poses the question, what is
reality? - something we project in our head, or is it
something that stands immutable? Efforts at human
communication are lost among Pynchon's
characters, nearly all of whom are obsessed with
the presumed cryptography in the chance
juxtaposition of Things, in the music and idiom of
bars like the V-Note or The Scope, or merely in the

"vast sprawl of houses" that Oedipa sees outside

Los Angeles, reminding her of the printed circuit of a
transistor radio, with its "intent to communicate."
Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel is one of
several American novels dealing in a more or less
experimental way with the Second World War which
came out in the late sixties and early seventies.
After an introductory section, apparently about how
the novel came to be written, the reader is plunged
a deeper level into the narrative. The lengthy
subtitle of the novel takes images from both of these
levels (the Children's Crusade, aliens from
Trafalmadore) to make the book seem almost
inexplicable - the opposite of the normal function of
a subtitle. The main narrative is the story of Billy
Pilgrim, an optometrist from New England. But it
does not tell us his life story, or even concentrate on
the war or the bombing of Dresden. A second
science fiction clich, the abduction of Pilgrim by the
Tralfamadorans, is used to allow Vonnegut to
comment on the absurdity of human culture;
combined with the time travel, this is not confined to
the period chronologically after the abduction. The
characterization of Vonnegut's characters is neither
dramatic nor descriptive: they are merely there. That
is a large part of the story line, though. Vonnegut
wants one to think that the characters have no will

of their own and are led by a stronger force: fate.

Vonnegut is not a very emotional writer; he simply
brings his ideas to the mind of the reader and lets
the reader decide how to feel. The one technique
that Vonnegut does use is humor, in the form of
characters such as Kilgore Trout and the activities
that they do and their dialogue. Continuing the
narrative experiments of the modernists, the first
generation of postmodernists, American and British
writers of the 1960s and 1970s "metafiction" (Kurt
Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John
Fowles, and Angela Carter), produced texts that
simultaneously questioned and violated the
conventions of traditional narrative. Another
hallmark of postmodern literature, and of
postmodern art in general, is the erosion of the
boundaries between "high," elite, or serious art and
"low," popular art, or entertainment. Decidedly
serious literary works now make use of genres long
thought to belong only to popular work. A related
phenomenon is the development of numerous
hybrid genres that erode the distinctions, for
instance, between literature and journalism,
literature and (auto)biography, and literature and
history.