Posts Tagged ‘novel structure’

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Thursday, January 28th, 2010

January 28, 2010
Washington, DC

toysoldiers

#6 by Jorge Miente via Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorgemiente/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 Three of the novels in The Big Read library are composed of interlinked stories: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Here’s O’Brien’s gem of an explanation (as you’ll see, pun intended) on the structure of his novel.

I wanted to have self-contained stories; I think all chapters of books ought to be, anyway.  You shouldn’t just arbitrarily end a chapter and say, “Well, continue it.”  There has to be some sense of resolution. . . And yet, I wanted each section or story to receive the light of other stories the way it would in a necklace.  Or one gemstone would receive the light of the ruby next to it.  And that would receive the light of the diamond and other rubies.  So that although they are meant to stand alone, and one would hope you could appreciate the story on its own, it seems to me that in the end, you aim ambitiously for what  writers worth their salt aim at. . .making a book of art of some sort.  And that’s the sense of pieces being in position so that they can reflect.  That was a big part of putting [The Things They Carried] together and deciding what to write.  So that pieces are capable of not just reflecting, but absorbing the light of other pieces.

Where are they reading The Things They Carried or another Big Read title near you? Check The Big Read calendar to find out.

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Posted in The Things They Carried | 5 Comments »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

September 24, 2009
Washington, DC

ScottFitzgeraldVanVechten

Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Carl Van Vechten, June 4, 1932. From the collection of The Library of Congress.

Happy Birthday F. Scott Fitzgerald! In honor of  the 113th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s birth—at 481 Laurel Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota—here’s the late literary scholar Matthew Bruccoli on the structure of The Great Gatsby and “the proper duty of a good reader.”

The structure of The Great Gatsby is extraordinary because of Fitzgerald’s brilliant manipulation of what is called the partially, or partly involved, narrator, Nick. Usually the narrator of the novel, if there’s a narrator, it’s the hero. . . But as in the work of Joseph Conrad, which I think Fitzgerald learned a great deal from, the narrator of The Great Gatsby is a minor character, but he’s there to document what happens. There is no scene at which Nick is not present. When Nick has to tell us something about Gatsby’s past, he tells us when Gatsby told it to him, the occasion, the circumstances under which Gatsby told it to him. The structure, the organization of The Great Gatsby is virtually perfect. There are some chronological glitches—sometimes he’s off a couple of days or a week. If you take the whole novel apart and you put a chart on the wall, which I’ve done, there are too many things in the space of one summer.

This business of a reader, a scholar, a teacher, a critic saying “Gotcha” is criminal! The thing to do with a brilliant piece of work is to worship it!  Because the answer is, if I know so  much, how come I didn’t write The Great Gatsby?  No! The proper duty of a good reader is to recognize genius and celebrate it.

To hear more from Matthew Bruccoli, Gish Jen, Robert Redford, and others on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his works, take a listen to The Great Gatsby radio show.

Visit The Big Read calendar to find a Big Read celebration of The Great Gatsby (and maybe some birthday cake) near you!

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Posted in The Great Gatsby | 3 Comments »