Certain phenomena in contemporary fiction reveal the current stage of the epic novel's evolution. If a major impulse of the modern novel has been the attempt to deal with the wide-scale social and political dimensions of existence, a rival impulse has been the efforts of writers to conduct deeply personal investigation. In the second half of this century, a number of writers on both sides of the Atlantic--inviting, through large-scale theme and complex structure, epic consideration for their work--have sought, with resultant experimentation in form, to reconcile these impulses by combining accounts of personal experience with the examination of contemporary affairs.;Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Norman Mailer's Why Are We In Vietnam? are particularly useful in the examination of radical shifts and fusions of narrative voice symptomatic of the interpenetrations of public and private worlds. The Golden Notebook's six distinct texts (comprising twenty-two sequences) plus additional editorial comment, reflect not only the fragmentation of Anna Wulf, principal character and narrator, but the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world. This condition is matched by continual undercutting of successive versions of "the real" throughout the novel. This undercutting, a kind of Brechtian epic/dialectical technique for detachment, gives way to the penultimate section of the novel, where characters and voices fuse and admit the author into the condition of her characters and narrative. The narrative of Why Are We In Vietnam? simultaneously presents itself as the recollection by a Dallas youth of a hunting trip to Alaska two years before his current farewell dinner as he leaves for Vietnam, and as the improvisational cosmic broadcast to a waiting national audience. As these two narrative positions are themselves challenged by other possible narrative identities, first and third person postures interconnect as the author shares his narrators' condition. Thus Lessing, who sets out to render not merely a particular female sensibility but the political temper of the mid-twentieth century, and Mailer, who attempts to arrive at a trope for the vertiginous contemporary American experience, achieve ways to participate in the conditions and situations of their nominally separate representative twentieth-century heroes.
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