Confession in the novel

Les W. Smith

Contemporary criticism generally neglects the author's role in narrative, a tendency that conflicts with compelling advances in physics that contrarily stress the immediacy of connection in subject-object relations. This book addresses the issue through theoretical elaboration of Bakhtin's concept of author and its application to works in which authors are explicitly concerned with their relations to characters. A heritage of conflict in author-character relations emerges through works by Dostoevsky, Mauriac, O'Connor, and DeLillo, where the issue of a character's freedom from the author's perspective proves essential to understanding narrative form. In the case of all four authors, the novel always asserts the uniqueness of a creative act against the uniqueness of a creative act against traditional or contemporary outlooks that tend to level out distinctions between discursive practices and to homogenize human experience.