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Two Types of “Heroes” in Post-War British Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

William Van O'Connor
William Van O'Connor*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Extract

In novel after novel,“ William York Tindall says, in Forces in Modern British Literature, ”sensitive lads are apprenticed to life, formed by its forces, rebelling against them, sometimes failing, sometimes emerging in victory. . . . From 1903 onwards almost every first novel was a novel of adolescence.“ Samuel Butler, he adds, started the vogue with The Way of All Flesh (1903). He ”wrote this book between 1872 and 1884 to express hatred for his father, admiration for himself, and his dearest prejudices.“

Perhaps we can push the date back of 1903 to Huysmans' À rebours (1884) and his sensitive protagonist, des Esseintes. From Huysmans we go to Oscar Wilde, to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which owes much to À rebours. The world in which these sensitive young men find themselves is Philistine, money-grubbing, dull, insensitive.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , 1962 , pp. 168 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Notes

1 In America, the sensitive protagonist in an insensitive world was to be seen in Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine, This Side of Paradise (1920), John Dos Passos' John Andrews, Three Soldiers (1921), Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams, In Our Time (1924), William Faulkner's Bayard Sartoris, Sartoris (1929), and Thomas Wolfe's Eugene Gant, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). There are, of course, many similar novels in twentieth-century American fiction. We almost assume, in picking up a novel, that the protagonist will be poetic in temperament and in conflict with an indifferent, materialistic society.

2 Even more recent is My Fried Judas (1961), by Andrew Sinclair.

3 Amis' two later novels, I Like It Here (1958) and A Girl Like You (1960), are clearly Welfare State novels, and the protagonists have obvious connections with Lucky Jim, but neither has enough of the latter's characteristics to put him in the line we are trying to delimit.

4 Certain of Iris Murdoch's novels, and especially the latest, A Severed Head (1961), present the contemporary England—of London, of dons, artists, leftwingers, and the searching, skeptical young—but she has apparently dropped the Donahue type as protagonist.

5 The New Statesman and Nation, 26 June 1954.

6 The New York Times Book Review, 28 April 1957.