Narrative Perspective as Modernist Experimentalism
in Works by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner
Student: Johanna Rolf Student Number: s3048292 Supervisor: Dr. Irene Visser
Date of Completion: 16 January 2017 Word Count: 15,227
Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies. Department of English Language and Culture, University of Groningen
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Chapter One: Modernism, Experimentalism and Narrative Perspective 11
Chapter Two: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 19
Chapter Three: Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises 27
Chapter Four: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury 35
Conclusion 42
Abstract
This dissertation explores the experimentalism in narrative perspective in three modernist novels: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926), Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun
Also Rises (1927), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Experimentalism
Introduction
‘You are all a lost generation.’
– Gertrude Stein in conversation
fictional world, the changes expressed in literature have an impact on narrative perspective as well.
The three primary works of this thesis are influential works of modernist literature and were published after World War I. Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises was his first novel and was critically acclaimed, similar to the critical receptions of The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury. All three novels establish themes relevant of the post-war generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926) deals with the deterioration of the American Dream. The novel captures the rise of technology in the historical period of modernism, as well as the focus of the modernist literary movement on the consciousness, the lack of an exposition and the focus on the concept of time. The experimental aspect of the narrative perspective is the ambiguity of the narrator Nick. Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta:
The Sun Also Rises (1927) addresses the indifferent lifestyle of American expatriates after
the war. Hemingway experiments with the combination of objectivity with a first-person narrative. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) shows how the Civil War changed social structures in the South. Faulkner experiments with multiple perspectives, stream of consciousness and the lack of chronological order. All novels deal with the themes of loss and the social and political changes of the historical period of modernism. The novels represent the modernist literary movement’s concern with consciousness and experiment with conventional chronology and plot. Also, all three novels have first-person narrators and offer the possibility to compare the use of the narrative perspectives. In terms of experimentalism, the novels vary significantly in their experiments with narrative perspective, yet their experiments accomplish a similar effect, as I shall argue.
Ernest Hemingway, born in 1899 in Illinois, served the Red Cross in Italy in World War I, where he was wounded, similar to the narrator of his first novel Fiesta: The Sun Also
Rises. After that, Hemingway went to Paris and settled along with other American
Hemingway also met Gertrude Stein, who had an important impact on his style and suggested improvements to his work. Hemingway continued working as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War. His activities as a journalist had a severe impact on his writings, as the necessity to focus on the most important facts is what is reflected in his writing style as a novelist. The journalistic style with a focus on facts and short significant sentences is what characterizes Hemingway’s writing style as a novelist and his experience in journalism initialled his embracement to neutrality. Along with his wound from the war, Tyler claims that Hemingway is also well-known for the pain he had experienced in his life, like alcoholism, three divorces and mental illness that resulted in his suicide in 1961 (2). Hemingway declared that implicitness is a necessary feature for a writer and compared it to the principle of an iceberg:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice berg is due to only one eighth of it being above water (Death 183).
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose” (King James Bible, Eccles. 1.4-5). The contrast of the lost generation with the colourful and vibrant setting of the Spanish fiesta is one of the major themes of the novel, as well as the contrast of the sexually impotent Jake Barnes who is in love, but cannot act upon this love because of his wound. Philip Young claims that “Nothing leads anywhere in the book, and that is perhaps the real point of it. The action comes full circle – imitates, that is, the sun of the title, which also rises, only to hasten to the place where it arose” (10).
F. Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1896 in Minnesota, was also part of the expatriate writers who lived in Paris. Prigozy characterizes his career as “early success, then public oblivion, and finally posthumous resurrection” (1). Pelzer claims that Fitzgerald “created art from the life he lived” (1). Fitzgerald had given in to alcoholic excesses and parties, typical of the Jazz Age in New York City. After the marriage with Zelda Sayre, the couple was seen as representatives of the mundane young generation of the Jazz Age. His third novel The Great
Gatsby is his most celebrated work. The novel deals with the “Jazz Age” or the “Roaring
Twenties”, a time of economic prosperity and the resulting growth of the role technology, employed by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby by the references to the telephone and other machines that developed a dominant role in society. The Great Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious man who earns his reputation with big parties and his obvious wealth. His neighbour Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, does not know anything about Gatsby in the beginning. Nick is central in the novel, yet his narration focuses on Gatsby, so the construction of the narrative is experimental. After Gatsby is shot, Nick is disillusioned in the upper class.
Before turning to writing fiction, Faulkner began with writing poetry, until a visit to New Orleans and a meeting with writer Sherwood Anderson changed his focus to fiction. He was also visiting Paris in the 1920s, similar to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His novel The Sound
and the Fury, influenced by James Joyce and his use of stream of consciousness in Ulysses,
deals with the deterioration of the Southern aristocratic Compson family. The first chapter “April Seventh 1928” is told from Benjy Compson’s perspective, an autistic thirty-three-year-old man. His perception is limited and he cannot interpret what happens. The second chapter illustrates the day before Quentin Compson, Benjy’s brother, commits suicide. The sister Caddy is a central character for the brothers. Both Benjy and Quentin struggle severely with Caddy’s departure. The following chapter with Jason as the narrator shows his rule as the head of the family and his tyranny over his niece Quentin. The final chapter focuses on the housemaid Dilsey, who tries to keep the family together, but fails to do so. She has a big role in raising the children of the family. The perspectives in Faulkner’s novel are experimental because of the multiple perspectives, the destruction of time and the use of stream of consciousness.
narration by Ansgar Nünning. Also, the tone of narration and its implication for the overall theme of the novels is examined, as well as the internal perspective with the individual’s consciousness and the external perspective with the individual’s perception. I will approach the three novels with the mind-set of the historical period of modernism and its cultural context to explore how the use of perspective ties in with the situation of the individual, as well as with the use of close reading.
The first chapter addresses the historical period of modernism and the experimentalism of the modernist literary movement. I show that the social, cultural, political and technological changes of the period of modernism made people question the world view and the general conventions. The necessary consequence was to turn away from literary conventions as well. Writers of the literary movement of modernism were looking for new ways of expressing themselves and to show reality as it really was and how it felt, which lead to Ezra Pound’s aphorism “Make it new”. In Chapter Two, I claim that in The
Great Gatsby, the failure of the American Dream is reflected in the failure of Gatsby, and
that Fitzgerald experiments with narrative perspective in such a way that it is not clear to establish who exactly the main character is, Gatsby or Nick Carraway. This results in Nick’s narrative unreliability and the distance to Gatsby contributes to Gatsby’s mystification. The modernist aspect of The Great Gatsby is the novel’s focus on the perception of the individual. In Chapter Three, I argue that Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises also has an experimental use of narrative perspective because the point of view combines objectivity in tone with the subjectivity of a first-person-narrator. While the style is rather minimalistic, the underlying subjectivity suggests emotions. This use of style corresponds to Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory. Hemingway thereby establishes something new with an objective first-person narration. In Chapter Four, I argue that Faulkner’s novel The Sound
and the Fury is the most experimental one in terms of narrative perspective in comparison
Chapter One:
Modernism, Experimentalism and Narrative Perspective
The changes in the period of modernism lead to the modernist literary movement. This movement introduced changes in literary representation. Modernist writers were confronted with a crisis of representation, meaning the ways of representing reality before the period of modernism were no longer an appropriate way to represent reality. Artists were challenged with the struggle about how to represent reality, so they tried to come up with new ways of representing reality. The traditional conception of the novel was changed and not used in order to guide the reader, like with an exposition and a concluding end with no open questions. Lodge says that modernist novels can lack an exposition with situational context, so the reader is “plunged” into a stream of experience that also, just like the beginning, offers an open end to the story (45-46). Modernist literature “eschews the straight chronological ordering of its material, and the use of a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator” (Lodge 46). Furthermore, modernist novels are associated with the lack of a plot, or make use of a plot that plays with the reader’s expectation, as a modernist novel can reinterpret a traditional plot with “more obscure and minor sequences of events” (Lewis 166). Modernist novelists also used flashbacks and foreshadowing to experiment with the conventional chronology.
In order to achieve a representation of the new dimension of inner consciousness, the ways of literary representation had to be adjusted to the new psychological approach. The traditional scopes like chronology and plot were changed or dissolved to depict inner consciousness as accurately as possible. The subjective narrator of the modernist novel achieved narrative verisimilitude because the narrative perspective grasps human experience: “speaking or overheard in the act of living, directly involved with the people, objects, and concerns of his or her narrative world, or aligned with some particular character’s point of view” (Matz 219). Because of this new degree of subjectivity and focus on the mind of the narrator, “it is important, in analyzing perspective, to indicate not only a point or position from which the events are viewed, but also the kind of mind located at this position” (Niederhoff 385). Examining an image from a perspective means that it is the view of a character, so the image is subjectively shaped by the mind of the narrator. An important factor of first-person narration is its limitation, “both spatially and psychologically, to what the hero (a character) has experienced” (Edmiston 734). As Lewis says, the modernist literary movement negotiates the omniscient narrator and focuses on presenting reality from the viewpoint of an individual character (5). This viewpoint of the individual character focuses on how experiencing the world for this individual feels, rather than showing how the world objectively is. The shift from an objective perception to the subjective perception is an important characteristic of modernist fiction. The individual perception of the world was often implemented with the first-person-narrator to include the possibility of discovering the unconscious.
less guidance than the traditional perspectival structure. The modernist first-person-narrator invites the reader to identify with the narrator and to experience the events and reflections in a very personal and close manner. Also, the distinction between the narrating self and the narrated self in first-person narration provides information or reflecting thoughts of experience to the narrated self and creates two levels in the story, an apparent present now where the first-person-narrator tells the story and the past where the actions take place. Lodge argues this to be a disadvantage at times, since the reader does not experience the story as a continuous present and the immediacy of the story is weakened (40). Other critics argue that this is an advantage, since the first-person narrator is allowed “to provide spatial and psychological perceptions that the hero could not have provided at the moment of experience” (Edmiston 734). The distinction between the narrating and experiencing self contributes to the lack of a common denominator within first-person narration, as the experiencing and narrating self can offer different frameworks.
Chapter Two:
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist novel The Great Gatsby reflects the so called Jazz age. The beginning of the novel shows the immediate opening that is typical for the modernist movement. The plot begins “in medias res”: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since” (7). The narrator, Nick Carraway, tells the story of Jay Gatsby from his own point of view in a first-person perspective. George Garrett claims that The Great Gatsby is “a wildly experimental novel” because of the “double vision” of the narrator (115), which means the vision of the narrator concerning both the narrator and Gatsby. The reader experiences an approach to Gatsby from the outside, meaning not experiencing Gatsby’s story told by himself, but by his neighbour Carraway. The narrator openly displays a certain admiration for Gatsby: “I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction” (8). The choice of perspective creates gaps about the character Gatsby that picture him as an unreachable phenomenon.
people” (170) and Gatsby’s “appalling sentimentality” (107). There are several textual indications of Nick’s unreliability, such as exclamations that reveal emotional involvement of the narrator: “As though they cared!” (98). The most striking sign of narrative unreliability is the extensive use of evaluative expressions that signify uncertainty on behalf of the narrator, such as “I felt” (22, 86, 88, 140), “He might have” (142), “I have an idea that” (153) or “It seemed to me” (24), as well as the frequent use of “if”, meaning that there are a lot of speculations on Nick’s part involved. Also, emphasizing one’s own credibility can be an indication for unreliable narration: “I firmly believe” (154) or “I could have sworn” (25). Carraway is also contradicting himself when he claims that he “had no sight into Daisy’s heart” (12), when later he is “looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes” (100). When talking about the events that took place at the garage, he says “Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before” (148). Nick then goes on to render specific descriptions of what happened at the garage, but it is “after we left”, so he was not present at the scene. These indications can be interpreted as unreliability and in any way demonstrate a high amount of subjectivity, which is typical for the modernist movement. Furthermore, the unreliability reflects experimentalism in the sense that when the world as it was could not be trusted, the narrative instance could not be trusted either. The fact that Nick escapes from his own identity and illustrates aspects that he cannot know as part of his unreliability also shows that Nick projects his own desires onto Gatsby. Gatsby is romantic, hopeful and believes in reliving the past, so he is everything that Nick is not. This paradox leads to Nick escaping into fantasies about Gatsby’s life.
has to display a certain amount of unreliability in order to complete the story he is writing about Gatsby. The use of poetic language adds to the impression of Nick escaping from his own identity as a viewer: “[Gatsby] had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way” (92-93). The escape from Nick’s identity is also supported by the fact that for Jordan Baker’s story, it changes to her first-person perspective; Nick does not do this for Gatsby’s stories. This emphasizes that regarding Jordan Baker, Nick clearly differentiates that it is her story: “When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this” (76). Gatsby’s experiences, however, are not separated from Nick’s identity, are part of his fantasy and are told as an indirect discourse, so he does not switch to Gatsby’s first-person voice. Nick remains in his own first-person narration in order to avoid the strong division he implements between himself and Jordan Baker. Gatsby is part of Nick and his fantasy, it is part of his voice and the lines are blurred. The apparent focus on Gatsby is also on Nick, who tries to render his very own image of Gatsby. The Great Gatsby includes the open perspectival structure of modernist novels with its openness about the separate facts and certainties of the individual characters. However, the use of the first-person perspective adds a new experimental dimension to this, as the narrative perspective suggests a closed structure, but the narrator expands the boundaries of his perspective in an imaginary quest to understand Gatsby. Nick claims that “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all” (10). Thus, his perspective – his window – gains a more successful picture of Gatsby without Gatsby’s perspective as a second window. Nick observes Gatsby through a single window as his neighbour in a literal sense and as his function as an observer in the novel. With this narrative construction, Fitzgerald shows the concern of the modernist movement that there is no universal, but always an individual perception of reality.
necessary to leave space for imagination in order to fill the gaps. The fact that Gatsby stays a mystery in the sense that there is no insight into his inner consciousness creates the impression of an unapproachable phenomenon rather than a human being. There are no indications about Gatsby’s appearance. The narrator stays vague when it comes to describing Gatsby: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (8). The vagueness of “something gorgeous” invites positive connotations, but nothing specific. Furthermore, Gatsby himself only appears in chapter three for the first time, which also emphasizes that the focus is also on Nick himself and his perceptions of Gatsby. By doing so, Fitzgerald creates a metaphor of the American Dream in the character Gatsby. The phenomenon of both the American Dream and Gatsby is unreachable, filled with imagination. This impression of Gatsby is strengthened by “Nick’s ideological focalization” (Messent 42). The narrator says that Gatsby had an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which is not likely I shall ever find again” (8). It is the uniqueness of Gatsby that Nick emphasizes here, the “romantic readiness”, an alliteration that characterizes Gatsby and his motifs in an idealizing manner. A simple smile of Gatsby leads Nick to say “It was on of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life” (49). Messent argues that “Nick has made Gatsby a hero on a romantic quest throughout his narrative” (39). The narrator’s choice of words strengthens this idea of a romantic quest, as it attributes a certain uniqueness to Gatsby. Nick admits that his “incredulity was submerged in fascination” (65), and his fascination and the peripheral perspective idealize Gatsby.
– and the reader – by surprise […] In an instant, Fitzgerald makes possible anything and everything about Gatsby” (Pelzer 82).
With passages that include indirect speeches where it is not clearly distinguishable who speaks, Fitzgerald emphasizes the focus on two individuals in a first-person narration. The narrator’s voice begins to fade away from the clear-cut connection to Nick, just like Nick escapes into Gatsby’s perspective: “[Gatsby’s] heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, […] his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (107). Gatsby’s and Nick’s consciousness merge and are inextricably connected. This interconnection is challenging: “Because of Fitzgerald’s use of indirect speech within the novel, it is finally impossible to say to what extent the narrating instance (Carraway’s voice) obliterates character (Gatsby)” (Messent 18). This lack of distinction reflects the focus on the individual of the modernist movement, but Fitzgerald creates an experiment by focusing on two individuals. The difficulty to distinguish between narrating instance and character is reflected in the general modernist conception of the whole novel, as it switches from dialogue to interior monologue or from chronology to non-chronological order. The conception creates the impression of fragmentation and can be regarded as an experiment with convention.
Although Nick creatively establishes an idea about Gatsby’s thoughts and words, the ultimate perception is Nick’s: “The Great Gatsby is not a melodrama about Jay Gatsby, but a definition of the senses in which Nick understands the word “great”” (Hanzo 190). The word “great” implies the romantic perseverance of the narrator. The novel is more focused on the narrator’s perception of Gatsby and shows modernist movement’s concern with consciousness. Nick establishes a narration that not only deals with his own consciousness, but also with Gatsby’s consciousness, although at times it is phrased in conditional sentences: “If that was true [Gatsby] must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (153).
The narrator only uses poetic language when diving into Gatsby’s thoughts or feelings and the rhetorical abilities of Nick and Gatsby are significantly different, which emphasizes that Gatsby is someone who serves as an outlet for the narrator’s fantasy. Nick does not use elaborate poetic language when his own feelings are concerned. An example for this is the simplistic statement “I enjoyed looking at her” (16). Nick’s affinity for romantic language ends when others apply it to him. When Daisy says he reminds her of a rose, he explains: “This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing” (19). This adds to the impression that the book is more about Gatsby as an outlet for Nick’s fantasy as an escape from the superficial society he dreads; Gatsby seems to be everything that Nick is not. The narrator, who “feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when [he] realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate relation was quivering on the horizon” (7), is confronted with someone like Gatsby who is willing to do everything to be with the person he loves. This contributes to the fact that The Great Gatsby is also about the individual Nick and his literary ambition to artistically phrase everything that Gatsby can not find the words for.
society to cope with past and present. Gatsby represents the past and refuses to admit that it can not be repeated. His neighbour Nick is watching Gatsby and renders the story in an ambiguous manner. Corresponding to the interaction of past and presence, the narrating self concludes on the second page of the novel what the experiencing self had learnt at the end: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end” (8). The narrator can provide psychological reflections that the experiencing self did not conclude on that level of the story. Messent claims that Nick’s “voice as retrospective narrator […] shifts almost imperceptibly into his voice as narrative participant” (13). This shift emphasizes that Nick as a peripheral narrator grasps Gatsby’s story on the level of the present, creating a juxtaposition of past in Gatsby and present in the narrator Nick. The moment when Gatsby and Daisy meet in Nick’s house is a clash of time, represented in the focus on the clock that had almost fallen to the floor because of Gatsby. When Nick says “I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor” (84), the lack of control that Gatsby has over turning the past into the present is visualized. Nick’s observing perspective, although not as objective and impartial as Nick claims it to be, allows a present stance of Gatsby and Daisy, an encounter that aims to repeat the past.
Chapter Three:
Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
In his novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway uses first-person narration and objectivity in an experimental manner. The narrator Jake establishes a seemingly objective narration, which is unusual for first-person narration. It is seemingly objective because while the style and tone are neutral and objective, there are indications of the narrator’s emotional state of mind that can be derived from the objective descriptions. First-person narration is a very subjective and personal type of narration. This narration corresponds to the modernist feature of representing reality from the viewpoint of an individual character. The characteristic of the modernist movement to focus on the individual and its point of view is also used in Hemingway’s novel, because the narration is limited to the perspective of the narrator. The narrator Jake is distanced to his emotions. This distance is an experiment with the subjectivity of first-person-narration.
Hemingway transfers the realist characteristics of documenting objectively how things are to first-person narration. First-person narration represents the modernist focus on the individual because the narration emphasizes how the individual copes with post-war experiences. Hemingway’s style of writing is known for its minimalistic and objective style. Cane claims that Hemingway’s writing “is notable for its short sentences, lack of subordination, reliance on nouns and verbs rather than adjectives and adverbs” (128). This style of writing in combination with a first-person narrator is unusual and can be seen as experimental. Mazzeno says that Hemingway generally “experiments in form and theme” (58). Raabe states that Hemingway’s use of objectivity which suggests subjectivity in Fiesta:
The Sun Also Rises is non-conventional (159). For instance, when Jake shows emotional
go by and down the street, and then I went to sleep. I woke up” (27). The repetition of “then” adds to the impression of a very neutral enumeration of facts, rather than an intimate access to the mind of the narrator. Jake impersonally describes what happened. He does not provide considerations or evaluation of events, and his focus on facts emphasizes his incapability to deal with his emotions. Bond claims that “as narrator, Jake is devoid of hindsight, supplies no other ordering principle than the strict chronology of events” (64). The frequent use of enumerations, connecting short main clauses to each other, adds to the impression of chronology as the only ordering principle. According to Hart, this type of style has a specific purpose: “The novel requires that the reader fill in the details and at once resist by doing so. By imagining that peculiar pain [of Jake’s physical condition], the reader participates in it” (558). The tone of the narration represents Hemingway’s iceberg principle. This principle is based on the omission of certain aspects of a story, and that the omitted aspects can be felt as if they had been written. Despite the objectiveness of the narrator Jake, there are signs that can be interpreted as unreliable narration.
memory. A lack of memory indicates that certain aspects of the story are missing, so the aspect of reliability is weakened. Bond notes that “Hemingway likens memory corporality in its construction. Like body, memory is extended. Pieces of it can be broken off and lost” (61). Jake’s wound from the war displays the fragility of the human body, similar to his unreliability reflecting the fragility of the human mind. Another example for Jake’s unreliability are speculations: “I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett” (187), “I guess. […] I guess” (27). The narrator also directly omits words: “’. . . .’ the drummer chanted. […] ‘. . . .’ the drummer sang softly. […]’. . . .’ the drummer shouted and grinned at Brett” (56). These omissions can be interpreted as an example for emotions as well. The fact that the drummer grins at Brett might stir jealousy in Jake, so the narrator avoids dealing with what the drummer precisely said. The tone remains objective, but the omission is an example for unreliability and also implies the narrator’s jealousy.
letters” he is only able to write. The deeper psychological level implies that the narrator is very insecure about his masculinity because of his wound. Also, he feels anger and sadness because he can not physically love Brett and has to watch her with other men. There is no direct expression of Jake’s emotional disposition. Nonetheless, it is indicated that because of his emotions and disappointment, his ability to write good letters is affected: “A sensitive reader, though, recognizes Jake’s reticence, his deliberately behaviouristic account of his emotional moments […] as part of an iron control, seldom relaxed, over volatile emotions” (Moseley 303). Hemingway conveys the inner state of the narrator, although the narrator does not actively deal with his own state of mind.
nor clearly partial. We see through his eyes, and yet part of what we see is always him. Like an optical instrument, his power of vision controls and modifies what is shown, and yet it remains impervious to judgment” (225). This description grasps the uniqueness of Hemingway’s style in combination with the first-person narrator. Jake’s vision controls the narration, but because he holds his own judgement back most of the time and his emotions are only implied, the objectivity still remains. Despite the dominating neutrality, the exploration of the narrator’s inner state is part of the narrative.
Hemingway uses interior monologue in the novel to emphasize the inability of the narrator to deal with his emotional state, even on the deepest psychological level in Jake’s thought processes. When Jake is in church and tries to pray, he begins an interior monologue that illuminates some details of his past. This interior monologue shows Jake’s consciousness. Halliday claims that the interior monologue in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises is used to display the narrator’s consciousness without retrospective construction (209). Hemingway thereby creates something new and experimental, because “when […] a subjective action is not accompanied by any significant outward action or perception, Hemingway turns to the interior monologue, avoiding a retrospective account” (Halliday 208-09). Jake does not display “the stigmata of retrospective reconstruction” (Halliday 208). This means that a first-person narrator that has an extraordinary memory like an omniscient narrator is likely to lack immediacy. Hemingway avoids this extraordinary memory by not having Jake recapitulate his past in extensive detail. There is no confusion between objective behaviour (bodily actions) and subjective behaviour (actions of the mind). Hemingway preserves immediacy with his use of interior monologue, for instance:
Instead of extensively recapitulating his first encounter with Brett or his associations with his way to England, Jake lets his thoughts run along. He jumps from his condemnation of people to the Catholic Church and then addresses himself to take the advice “Not to think about it”. This advice is the maxim of Jake’s narrative, as he constantly refuses to deal with his inner disposition and tries not to think about. Another example of the immediacy of interior monologue in the novel is when Jake is praying:
I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seem him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me (85).
By jumping from thought to thought without retrospective explanations, immediacy is preserved. The interior monologue is adjusted to the minimalistic tone of the narration and is experimental, because interior monologue is characteristically highly subjective. The narrator neutrally enumerates with “and then”, until the objective action of his forehead on the wood is introduced. In this interior monologue, the short main clauses of objective behaviour are replaced by a hypotactic sentence. The hypotactic sentence emphasizes the interior monologue and the narrator’s train of thought. Moreover, the difference in sentence structure distinguishes the narrator’s inner consciousness from his paratactic narration of objective plot elements. The use of interior monologue is separated by syntax and context from the rest of the narration, so there is no confusion between bodily actions and actions of the mind. The immediacy of the interior monologue is a modernist concern. The focus on the individual is emphasized, yet the interior monologue is adjusted to the tone of narration.
of character that mirrors the lack of stability in the modernist world. The concept of character is an experimental aspect of the novel, because the characters are lacking individuality. The narrator Jake and other characters are strikingly similar in their use of analogous utterances. The characters are unreliable because of their contrary characterizations and their similar verbal utterances. The difficulty to distinguish the characters reflects the modernist trait of open perspectival structure in which “the separate ‘truths’ of the individual characters cannot be reduced to a common denominator” (Fludernik 39). The difficulty to distinguish the characters is due to their verbal utterances. Messent claims that because of the similar use of words, the character’s statements are merging and their individual voices blur (125). An example for this is this: “’Let’s utilize it.’ He [Harris] had taken up utilizing from Bill” (112). The characters use similar words and echo each other. The difficulty to distinguish the characters’ voices is caused by the way they characterize each other. The contradictory way Brett describes Mike (“[Mike]’s so damned nice and he’s so awful” (213)) is very similar to Bill’s description of Cohn (“The funny thing is [Cohn]’s nice, too. I like him. But he’s just so awful” (89)). As Messent claims, these types of characterization create the problem of a paradox because of the contrary characterization, but also the problem of similarity because of the way the description is repeated (86). Both the narrator Jake and the other characters correspond to the feature of modernist characters, which are “fragmented […], changeable, often irresolute, and occasionally absent” (Phelan, Reading 13). The characters in the novel are unreliable because of their contradictory utterances and their similar use of words. The echo that is created in their utterances emphasizes the myth of individuality in the novel, as Messent claims (128). The myth of individuality reflects the narration of Jake, because although it is first-person narration, there is very little subjectivity.
subjectivity in terms of unreliable narration and a few subjective statements, the narrator’s inner state is only implied. Furthermore, the characterization is also experimental in the novel. A clear distinction between the characters is challenged by their similar utterances and use of vocabulary as well as the way they describe each other. Also, Hemingway makes use of the open and abrupt beginning and end. According to Fore, the ending reflects the harmfulness of the attitude of Jake: “The novel’s downbeat ending suggests that a philosophy that continually denies bodily realities can be as physically and mentally destructive as a literal wound” (76). The denial of reality has the same effect as the reality that is denied, so as reflected in the title that the sun will also rise, the circular movement of denial and the consequence will be the same.
Chapter Four:
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury shows an experimental use of narrative perspective because of the use of three first-person narrators as well as the unique usage of stream of consciousness. Also, the novel experiments with the concept of time. Faulkner uses four perspectives that are separate from each other, but in connection they tell the story of the Compson family in which time is an issue. The novel consists of three first-person narrators and an omniscient narrator in the last chapter. This implementation of several perspectives is typical for the modernist literary movement. As Matz says, the insight that the perception of reality varied from perspective to perspective established the use of different perspectives in the modernist novel (219). The use of several perspectives emphasizes the shattered Compson family.
sounds. The perspective is restricted to Benjy’s perception, and because his mental abilities are limited, so is his narrative. Burton argues that because of Benjy’s disability, a particular truthfulness of the narrative is created, as Benjy can be seen as naïve and innocent (210). The perspective shows Benjy’s perception of reality, and the choice of such a mentally limited perspective can be seen as experimental. Benjy’s mental limitations attach him to the basic concept of the order of the current state of his environment. All changes of this state of his environment such as deviations in Caddy’s smell have severe consequences for Benjy. The limitation of Benjy never enabled him to reach further than this basic concept, while the rest of his family left the basic concepts behind because of their egotism. Similar to the violation of order that Benjy realizes only in abstract terms, he also does not recognize the notion of time. The concept of time is experimented with because the narrator does not distinguish between past and present: “Benjy’s section, taken by itself, is constantly interrupted by jumps and analepses” (Messent 50). These jumps and analepses, however, are indicated by the use of italics: “I hushed and got in the water and Roskus came and said to
come to supper and Caddy said, It’s not supper time yet. I’m not going. She was wet”
(Faulkner 13). Benjy’s narrative is created through associations and intuitions, not through the concept of time. Past and present are one to him, so Faulkner creates a narrator that because he does not have mental access to the social construct of time, he is able to see and feel the fundamental values that are violated in the Compson family. Swiggart claims that “Benjy’s intelligence, unlike Quentin’s, has not degenerated or become perverted by egoism; it simply has been arrested at a primitive or animalistic level” (232). The primitive level of Benjy offers a trustworthy account of the deterioration of the Compson family because of Benjy’s innocence.
emphasizes Quentin’s mental chaos. The contrast between Benjy to whom past and present are one and Quentin who is unable to let go of the past shows the individual’s perception of time, shows how the perception of reality is different for each individual. This contrast reflects the complexity of Quentin’s mind and the struggle that is present in his perspective. The perspective of Quentin does not provide facts of what happened, but shows the psychological effect of what had happened. While Benjy can not distinguish between past, present and future, Quentin is also not able to deal with time, because he can not process the past. This bridges to The Great Gatsby, as Jay Gatsby refuses to live in the present and to admit that the past is over and can not be repeated. Similar to Benjy’s section, Quentin’s part also lacks a clear temporal awareness. There are also jumps from past to present, marked by the use of italics:
I found the gasoline in Shreve’s room and spread the vest on the table, where it would be flat, and opened the gasoline. the first car in town a girl Girl that’s what Jason couldn’t bear the smell of gasoline making him sick then got madder than ever because a girl had no sister but Benjamin Benjamin the child of my sorrowful if I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother It took a lot of gasoline, and then I couldn’t tell if it was still the stain or just the gasoline (145).
novel. Quentin’s struggle with time reflects the conflict between values of the Old South with the new values of modernism. Quentin is offended by Caddy and her promiscuity, his old values are challenged. The conflict of clashing values by changes in time is emphasized in the perspective of Quentin with the use of stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is accompanied by a restlessness created by a lack of context and punctuation. This technique aims to represent Quentin’s consciousness as realistically as possible:
Country people poor things they never saw an auto before lots of them honk the horn Candace so She wouldn’t look at me they’ll get out of the way wouldn’t look at me your father wouldn’t like it if you were to injure on of them I’ll declare your father will simply have to get an auto now (78).
It is indicated that Quentin is reminiscing a conversation with his mother, and the short insertion in italics can be interpreted as Quentin’s perception of the conversation. The repetition of “wouldn’t look at me” emphasizes the way Quentin’s memories are intertwined and how this lack of gaze had an intense impact on him. The stream of consciousness grasps the mental chaos of Quentin on a syntactical level. The experimental aspect of the use of stream of consciousness is also the way dialogue is represented within this stream:
the air seemed to drizzle with honeysuckle and with the rasping of crickets a substance you could feel on the flesh
is Benjy still crying
I dont know yes I dont know poor Benjy (126).
in the novel can be described as experimental, as it also displays the lack of punctuation and syntax. Faulkner also frequently changes between stream of consciousness as the inward perception of the narrator and the outer perception of Quentin. This change adds to the experimental aspect of the perspective.
experimentalism of the novel. The third section adds to the picture of the family and serves as another lens to the effects of the past on the present.
The last chapter of the novel is told by an omniscient narrator focusing on the black servants of the family who, because of their social status, do not have a voice in the family. Their lower status is reflected in the change to the omniscient narrator instead of continuing with a first-person narration of Dilsey, because their personal point of view is not relevant for the Compson family. However, the omniscient narrator indicates that the servants are the ones representing social and moral order: “a cabinet clock ticked, then […] struck five times. ‘Eight o’clock,’ Dilsey said. She ceased and tilted her head upward, listening” (233). Dilsey is correcting the clock, so she is able to deal with the concept of time and says it out loud, just like she sees the deterioration of the family. She is the one who brings order into the family’s disorder. Vickery argues that Dilsey becomes the “embodiment of truth” (1020) and that the use of her point of view would have shown the reality under the subjective conditions of Dilsey’s mind. With the omniscient narrator, however, there is the undeniable fact that past is past, and that the time of the Compson family is coming to an end. The omniscient perspective underlines the omniscient role of Dilsey, meaning that she knows all about the characters of the family and how to deal with them. Campbell claims that the omniscient narrator shows a “more ironic objectivity for the anti-climax that is appropriate to the conclusion of tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing” (317). The omniscient narrator in the last chapter offers a fitting ending for a story with a modernist plot, as it reflects the sense of change and things falling apart. Also, the last chapter bridges the first chapter because both Benjy and the servants of the family are the ones that are aware of the decay of the family, yet both Benjy and the servants are the least capable of doing something against the deterioration of the Compsons.
experimentalism with plot and syntax is especially relevant in the first two chapters. The destruction of syntax is frequently used when Faulkner is demonstrating stream of consciousness in the narrative in order to represent the interior psyche of the narrator as close to reality as possible: “Why shouldn’t you I want my boys to be more than friends yes Candace and Quentin more than friends Father I have committed what a pity you had no brother or sister No sister no sister had no sister Don’t ask Quentin” (79). It is implied that Quentin seems to be recapitulating a conversation with his father, yet it is not clear who is speaking or when that conversation took place. The insert “Father I have committed” is not complete and the whole sequence is lacking punctuation. With this use of stream of consciousness, Faulkner represents the mental chaos of the narrators on the level of the narrative.
Conclusion
The three novels The Great Gatsby, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises and The Sound and the Fury are experimental in their narrative perspectives and deal with the life of the so called lost generation. As this is the time in which the notion of experimentalism emerged, the novels are particularly relevant for analysing experimentalism in twentieth century fiction. The three novels share their use of first-person narration, which mirrors modernist movement’s aim to represent an individual’s subjectivity. The Great War had stamped the period of modernism in many ways and lead to a crisis of representation for artists. Artists were looking for new ways to get closer to the reality after war. To dissolve literary conventions such as syntax, plot or character were common characteristics for the modernist movement in literature.
Although both Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby make use of the first-person narrator, the different impression of the degree of
of life that fascinates the narrator. The romantic idealization of Gatsby and his unshakable belief in love is what Nick perceives as “great”. In contrast to the poetic language that the narrator Nick displays, Hemingway’s narrator Jake Barnes is very objective and implications about his emotional disposition have to be derived from his objective statements. This shows a new dimension of first-person narration and how objectivity can be used to only imply a narrator’s inner state. Because of the limitation to only perceiving the narrative from Jake Barnes’ point of view, his explicit internal condition remains only implied because the narrator does not actively deal with it. In contrast to Nick Carraway, Jake Barnes does not fill his narrative with imagination or poetical embellishments. As I have shown in Chapter Two, there is also a degree of objectivity in Nick Carraway, who only employs the poetic language when talking about Gatsby and his feelings. When Nick is talking about his own emotions, he stays rather neutral. Jake Barnes, however, shows very few signs of subjectivity. The general tone of the novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises exemplifies Hemingway’s iceberg principle: “All of Jake's protective reserve, his individualism, and his bitter honesty, are explored and reinforced by a technical perspective which in effect is itself necessarily exclusive, individual, limited […] and authentic […]. Thus theme, characterization of the hero, and technique are mutually supporting” (Halliday 204). The limitation to Jake’s perspective and the tone of an eye-witness report in combination with the narrator’s incapability to directly express his frustration and desperation after the war is experimental. The combination goes against literary conventions and adds a new dimension to the first-person perspective, because this perspective is traditionally associated with a high degree of subjectivity.
narrating the story of Gatsby, his functions as both character in the story as well as his functions as a narrator can function independently (Narrative as Rhetoric 110). This means that the signs of unreliable narration could be disregarded with his function as a narrator that has to fill the story around the character Gatsby. However, as I have validated in Chapter Two, in combination with the textual signs of unreliability, Fitzgerald creates an experimental combination of a contradicting narrator that finds himself so different from his hero Gatsby that he somehow despises him yet adores him at the same time. This is reflected in his unreliability and his role as a narrator. Jake Barnes, in contrast, has a distanced role as a narrator. His signs of narrative unreliability are somewhat striking with regard to his objective tone of narration. Jake Barnes shows omissions, speculations and utterances that signify uncertainty, which reflects his physical wound. Similar to his body, his psychological disposition shows impediments as well. In Hemingway’s novel, the subtle signs of narrative unreliability contribute to the implication of the narrator’s inner disposition. This can be regarded as experimentalism, because of the embedment of unreliability in a highly objective and implicit style of narration. I conclude that the focus on the individual as it is typical for the modernist movement is expressed in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby by showing how the individual struggles to deal with the post-war society and take refuge in glorifying someone who seems to have what others have lost, like Gatsby and his hope, and Jake Barnes in taking refuge in not actively dealing with his emotional disposition.
Both The Great Gatsby and Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises experiment with the concept of character as a necessary consequence of experimenting with the narrative perspective and literary conventions. There is a difficulty to distinguish the characters in Fiesta: The Sun
Also Rises due to the way the verbal utterances of the characters are echoing each other and
speech and descriptions are referring. This difficulty mirrors the character similarity in Hemingway’s novel, and it shows how both narratives experiment with the concept of character and narration in order to experiment with narrative perspective, as these difficulties are reflected in the narrating instance as well. In modernist times with its challenges and changes, the concept of character is changing as well, developing into a less stable constant. The focus on the individual that is typical for the modernist literary movement in these two novels show the evaporation of character.
William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is the most experimental novel compared to the two other novels. The way Faulkner employs time shifts within the stream of consciousness technique in combination with four different perspectives highlights the shattered Compson family. The use of four different perspectives in a nonlinear chronology goes against the literary convention of plot chronology. Also, the focus on the interior stream of consciousness diminishes the notion of a traditional plot. In addition to that, the perspectives in Faulkner’s novel gradually approach the final perspective with an omniscient narrator, which still shows a shattered family, so the life of the family is “full of sound and fury” in every way. Faulkner uses three highly subjective and one omniscient perspective to emphasize how the perception of reality effects each individual differently. The shattered perspectives emphasize the status of the family, and the perspectives also represent the modernist world in its shattered values. In order to represent this world, the novel has to be shattered as well, put together through different perspectives that show how the perception of reality varies from perspective to perspective.
As I have demonstrated in Chapter Four, the element of time is a central feature in Faulkner’s novel, and this notion of time also adds to the experimentalism of The Sound and
the Fury which none of the two other novels has concerning the notion of time. The diffusion
omniscient narrator in the fourth chapter focalizing Dilsey cannot picture anything else about the future for the Compson family. The future for the family is unreachable, destroyed by the past and swallowed up by the present, because none of the children of the Compson family was able to deal with the past. In order to establish the notion of destruction, Faulkner destroyed the traditional narrative, as well as the traditional concept of time and plot. The two other novels do not experiment with the notion of time and are less experimental, so time is an important facet in terms of experimentalism. Fitzgerald also employs the notion of time in The Great Gatsby. Similar to Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, Gatsby is preoccupied with the past and refuses to acknowledge that it is over. Both Gatsby and Quentin try to hold on to the past and attempt to create their own individual version of it, but both fail to do so.
particularly relevant in Faulkner’s novel. As I have argued in Chapter Three, the narrator in Hemingway’s novel does not surrender to retrospective imagination, but preserves immediacy in the interior monologue. Although there is a similar stream of thought as it is in Faulkner, the level of time is always clear in Jake Barnes’ narration. This clarity corresponds to his narrative tone in general.
In all three novels the disillusionment of the narrators is emphasized with the perspective. The instability of the world is reflected in the unsteadiness of the interior perspective in all three novels. Instead of a conventional narrative, the authors of the three novels establish narrative perspectives that show the loss of an objective reality. The experimentalism in all three novels emphasizes how each individual perceives their subjective reality. The disillusionment as the major theme of the three novels show that the narrators are also disillusioned with their inner perspective as well, as they are all struggling to deal with both their inner condition and the social situation they find themselves in. The modernist concern with the notion of time is reflected in The Great Gatsby in Gatsby who refuses to admit that the past is over and cannot be repeated, and in The Sound and the Fury in the Compson brothers that are struggling with the consequences of the past, similar to Hemingway’s narrator Jake Barnes who struggles with the consequences of war. All three novels emphasize the individual perception of reality and the consequences of disillusionment for each narrator. Instead of stating the objective facts, the narrators show the consequences of the objective facts with an instability in the narrative perspective.
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