Suppressing unsavory truths : psychological dynamics of first-person narrators in modernist retrospective novels

• Main Authors: Ji-Ching Hsiung, 熊積慶
• Other Authors: James Barton Rollins
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/79034054432015892026

博士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 102 === Realist fiction pays particular attention to ethics and tends to be didactic. Some realist writers endeavor to get into the minds of their characters, faithfully treating their internal struggles to make ethical decisions. This dissertation concerns modernist first-person retrospective novels, a sub-genre accentuating the narrators’ autonomy in reconstructing the past. It argues that the narrators, unlike their realist counterparts, consciously embroider their respective stories so as to suppress unsavory truths. Following an introductory chapter that considers the germination of this particular mode of fiction in the early twentieth century and sketches out my theoretical concerns, the dissertation scrupulously examines three such novels, attempting to detect psychological dynamics of holding back conscienceless facts within each narrator. Bergson regards intuition as a method of “thinking in duration” which registers the continuous flow of reality. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway’s attitude toward Gatsby is occasionally equivocal, but in his prolonged perception he reassembles the events concerning Gatsby and enters into them directly as a way to overcome the limitations of his own perspective. Affected by the calamity of Gatsby, the narrator downplays the immoral and outlawed behavior of the self-made man and eulogizes his will to realize his dreams. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert seems to be a lawyer representing both sides of a lawsuit. He often imaginarily subverts public moral disapproval of his pedophiliac lust, and constructs a fictive world of ecstasy through the self-deception characteristic of ressentiment. While for Nietzsche the direction-changer of ressentiment is the ascetic priest, it is not a priest but Lolita who ultimately seduces Humbert into the realization that he himself is to blame. The Remains of the Day pushes the sub-genre to a new extreme. Stevens, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, seems to go through the experience of becoming-other; the aging butler on his journey poses as a gentleman, both attire and language. Stevens’s “contributions,” built on the protean nature or becomingness of things, turn out to be his rationalizations to conceal the unethical truth about Lord Darlington, whom he spent much of his life serving. In sum, facing morally disreputable truths, the narrators display different ways of suppressing those truths. Their writings allow us to track them as they are psychologically in flux. Juxtaposing the three modernist retrospective novels under discussion, the dissertation is a compilation showing the development of this unique sub-genre. [KEYWORDS] Modernism, psychological realism, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Remains of the Day, ressentiment