ABSTRACT
In their various ways, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Nathaniel West display one quality of the recent novel which can only be described as obsession. These writers and many like them seem to be chained to their typewriters like the German soldiers of the atrocity story chained to their machine-guns. Virginia Woolf dealt with the theme almost exclusively in her rather arty novels, while in America, obsessed novelists like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe discovered in the theme of isolation broad possibilities for the organization of American experience. In contrast to the English and consistent with American tradition, their perception of isolation can be described as sociological; they are more concerned with reasons and effects. The great difference between Malraux and the English and American obsessed novelist, is that the latter are controlled by idea in their novels, where Malraux maintains a distinction between his novels and his other writing.
