The education novel describes stages in the life of its main character as the individual develops as a person. For example, in Great Expectations (1860-1861), English author Charles Dickens describes a boy named Pip as he grows up and the challenges he faces as he comes to terms with his own actions. The Mill on the Floss (1860) by English novelist George Eliot deals with a young girl and the consequences of her passions. Maggie Tulliver, although a character of intelligence and determination, is ultimately defeated by both the repressive society of her time and her own unwise impulses.
Le rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black) by French author Stendhal follows the maturation process of a young man named Julian Sorel. When he is accused of murder and brought into court, Julian refuses to make peace with the world around him. Instead, he simply does not bargain with a system that violates his personal integrity, and he is sentenced to death.
Defiance is also the motive of development in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by Irish writer James Joyce. As he grows up, the main character, Stephen Dedalus, finds that disobedience and betrayal—in Stephen's terms “silence, exile, cunning”—become ways for him to define himself. One of Joyce's favorite methods for representing the mind's discovery of the world was what he called epiphany—a “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.” In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen’s epiphanies take the form of unexpected perceptions in the course of daily life. For example, in the following passage he realizes the beauty of an ordinary girl:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh.
Even before psychology developed as an academic field in the late 1800s, education novels explored people’s emotions and memories. For example, in the mid-1800s Charles Dickens used the monstrous looking, menacing convict Magwitch, in Great Expectations, as a haunting presence. Acting as a long-repressed image of childhood pain and degradation, Magwitch symbolizes forces that spring from nowhere and yet control an individual’s destiny. English author D. H. Lawrence also deals with the surfacing and resolution of old psychic problems in Sons and Lovers (1913). The main character, Paul Morel, comes to terms with his love for his father, Walter Morel, by becoming friends with the hardened workman Baxter Dawes, who shares many traits with Walter.
Education novels need not be limited to the early years of a character’s life. What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) by Canadian author Robertson Davies spans the entire life of a character named Francis Cornish, from childhood and education through a career in espionage and on to retirement, at which time Francis becomes an art collector. Davies became known for incorporating theories of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in his work. One of the major Jungian ideas that Davies worked into his writings was that some experiences are shared on a subconscious level by all people.
Many education novels are concerned with an individual’s search for identity. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by American author James Weldon Johnson, a man whose mother is black and whose father is white struggles with committing himself fully to black society or white society. In the end the man—who is never given a name—decides on white society, but only because American culture allows black people to be treated so badly. Forty years later another American writer, Ralph Ellison, described a young black man’s search for his place in the world in Invisible Man (1952). Ellison’s character, also unnamed, finally withdraws from a society that pushes black people to the margins.
Philosophical Novel
Novelists have always found it relatively easy to include in their works theories and opinions about society, the universe, ethical values, and other ideas. Novels in which intellectual exploration is the main purpose are sometimes called philosophical novels. These works aim to confront the so-called eternal questions about freedom, humanity’s place in the universe, and the value of human effort.
In philosophical novels, characters are sometimes used to voice ideas and viewpoints, and they are as much spokespeople for theories and positions as they are independent figures. However, the philosophical novel differs from purely philosophical works because it embodies concepts in human personality and directs attention to the characters who hold opinions rather than just to the positions themselves.
Whereas most philosophical essays are concerned solely with ideas, the focal point for the philosophical novel is the consequence of ideas on ordinary lives. For example, Greek philosopher Plato and French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote works that present ideas of how children should be raised, but English novelist Charles Dickens in Hard Times (1854) shows how theories about family life translate into everyday living. In this novel, a theory of education has tragic consequences for the theorist’s own children.
In Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927), German author Thomas Mann uses both debates and complex symbolism to convey ideas about modern civilization and the self-tormenting condition of people concerned with intellectual exploration. The book is set in a mountain hospital for sufferers of tuberculosis. Cut off from their ordinary lives, Mann's characters experience a pure and painfully keen sense of human consciousness, and they debate different views of human life. A good example of Mann’s use of symbolism is the X ray, which becomes an emblem for poetic insight and for Mann’s research into the nature of human life. Another symbolic motif, infection, yields a possible insight into the nature of existence. “Life itself?” Mann writes, “Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which we might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial?”
Debate and symbolism are also techniques used by Czech writer Franz Kafka in Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), a philosophical novel about the challenges that face the individual in the modern world. Like Mann, Kafka chooses to filter issues through the life of an ordinary man. Joseph K., a conscientious bureaucrat, is awakened one morning by officials who tell him he is under arrest but who fail to specify his crime. K. searches for the solution to his situation by questioning those whom he considers witnesses and accomplices. But his encounters and debates with court officials, his lawyer, and others connected with the case only serve to help convict him of the unnamed crime. Kafka uses visual and symbolic images to convey the nightmarish aspect of K.’s trial. For example, in one scene, K. must locate the Court in the unlikely recesses of a tenement that is a maze filled with strangers who seem to know him. His wanderings symbolize that he is lost and does not know how to escape from his problems.
Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist influenced by Kafka, used philosophical novels to create a menacing political environment that prompts his characters to seek autonomy in play, sex, and art. In Nesnesnitelná lehkost bytí (first published in French, 1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984) he explores the pervasive effects of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia after 1968, when troops from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies marched into Czechoslovakia to reinforce Communist rule. Using episodes from the lives of two couples, meditative digressions, dream scenes, and re-creations of historical events, Kundera explores the nature of human identity in a time of police investigations, forced confessions, and ideological ruthlessness masked as democracy.
For Kundera, the novel form is “a poetic meditation on existence.” Portraying a society that destroys individuality through police investigations and forced confessions, he shows what happens to characters who feel “weightless” because they lack traditional values and ideals of selfhood. He addresses the difficulty of maintaining standards of morality and judgment under a government that demands total submission from its citizens.
Like Kafka and Kundera, American writer Walker Percy offers a devastating account of the modern sense of confusion, but Percy does not ground his writings in politics. Percy’s novel The Moviegoer (1961) is about Binx Bolling, a stockbroker who finds escape from his unsatisfying life in the fantasy world of cinema. As Binx searches for the meaning of life, Percy uses the cinema as a complex symbol of the possibilities available in the modern world, as well as the limitations of modern society as a place to gain a lasting sense of meaning.
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