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kwilson271 's review for:
Aspects of the Novel
by E.M. Forster
I loved this book. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
“If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.”
fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence…
We may divide characters into flat and round…. The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round.
This—as far as one can generalize—is the inherent defect of novels: they go off at the end: and there are two explanations of it: firstly, failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers: and secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing. The characters have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted commas. But the characters are gone or dead.
So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
“If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.”
fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence…
We may divide characters into flat and round…. The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round.
This—as far as one can generalize—is the inherent defect of novels: they go off at the end: and there are two explanations of it: firstly, failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers: and secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing. The characters have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted commas. But the characters are gone or dead.