Modernist Fiction: Inner Life, Narrative Voice, and Relativism

Modernist Fiction: A Shift in Focus

Modernist novels emphasize the inner life, reducing external action. Events often feel incomplete, reflecting a sense of irony and a rejection of traditional plot-driven narratives. The focus shifts to consciousness and the subconscious, diminishing the importance of external events. Instead, we find introspective analysis, reflections, allusions, evocations, suggestions, and dreams. This change necessitates a new approach to time, often presented as a stream of experience or interior monologue, with open and ambiguous endings. While not strictly modernist, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession exemplifies the use of irony.

Narrative Perspective and Relativism

20th-century Western culture moved away from dogma and absolutes towards relativism. This shift is reflected in the narrative voice of modernist fiction. The author doesn’t disappear entirely but takes on a fictional persona, becoming another character and losing the traditional authority of an omniscient narrator. Joyce’s narrator in Ulysses is a prime example, adapting to the situation and concealing their presence, creating a “voice without an origin.” The questions “who is speaking?” and “whose voice is this?” become difficult to answer.

Multiplicity of Narrators and Unreliable Witnesses

The multiplication of narrators is another sign of the decline of realism. As narrators become suspect, evidence turns into hearsay, and empiricism gives way to relativism. The exploitation of the unreliable witness is also typical, inviting the reader to participate in the work through open endings and interpretations.

Juxtapositions, Instability, and the Idea of “Non-Truth”

The term “modern” is unstable, pointing to two distinct world-visions: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, representing the opposition between reason and passion, objective and subjective, intellect and emotion. Modernism brings these tendencies together, assuming the coexistence of contradictions. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “such is the complexity of things.” Ezra Pound’s definition of the image as “that which presents in an instant of time an intellectual and emotional complex, a juxtaposition of the two tendencies” illustrates this dialectical scheme.

Key Characteristics of Modernist Fiction
  • Emphasis on the inner life and consciousness
  • Reduced external action and plot
  • Use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue
  • Ambiguous and open endings
  • Shift in narrative voice and perspective
  • Multiplication of narrators and unreliable witnesses
  • Juxtaposition of opposing ideas and concepts