As I have been thinking about the novel (considering our first draft is due on Friday) I googled our original topic for this class “the novel”. I found the website http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/novel.html. Here is the introduction:
The novel is only one of many possible prose narrative forms. It shares with other narratives, like the epic and the romance, two basic characteristics: a story and a story-teller. The epic tells a traditional story and is an amalgam of myth, history, and fiction. Its heroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and women. The romance also tells stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes adventure and often involves a quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy. The events seem to project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors of the human mind and are, therefore, analogous to the materials of dream, myth, and ritual. Although this is true of some novels as well, what distinguishes the novel from the romance is its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest, as Northrop Frye said, is “human character as it manifests itself in society.”
It then goes on to talk about the development of the novel, reasons for the novel’s popularity, experimentation with the novel, and proliferation of types. One of my favorite things that this person states is that the novel “represents the lives of the majority of people”. This I think is quite true and creepy at the same time. It’s true because in a sense it much easier to interpret then lets say poetry and shakespearean plays. However, it’s hard to think about how much it represents peoples lives especially in the novels that we have read this semester. I personally cannot relate to a sex change or fabricating my own abduction, but I do suppose that this has to pertain to some people, otherwise how would we have such stories come about. I think I might look into this idea of what other people think about the novel because it is definitely helping me to start getting a firm grasp on what I think the novel is.
