[lit-ideas] Sustained Incongruencies

  • From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2006 18:08:25 -0400

ck: But many okay novels, even good ones, are about self-absorbed characters whose stories are told by, self-absorbed first-person narrators--the writer's alter egos. And why not? There's no rule demanding that a novel be about others, no rule that people be "imagined" vs remembered or composited, like organic fertilizer, I guess.


Self-absorbed characters can only take a novel so far. _The Fall_ and _Lolita_ work, I think, because Camus and Nabokov know more and feel more than their narrators. My unschooled take on narcissism--please correct me Carol--is that a narcissistic personality organization lacks that transcendence, that empathy, and in extreme cases (the NPD Irene mentioned) narcissists treat people only as objects, and become increasingly grandiose, withdrawn, and isolated as they grow older. Like Humbert Humbert, but unlike Nabokov, there is no one else there, no real Lolita, for a narcissist.


We agree that there's no clay tablet of inscribed rules for novels, but I think characters have to be imagined or they can't be re-created on the page. (We may be quibbling about semantics here.) Also there's the notion of plot, the conflict of competing desires, which have their best expression when more than one character embodies them. Finally, there's the notion of identification. If the reader doesn't have sympathy for the narrator or protagonist, if you don't really care about the struggles of a book's narrative center, the hero if you will, then why read? And narcissists--who dismiss others, don't listen, lack empathy--would seem to be at a disadvantage in bringing about audience identification.


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