ABSTRACT
This book has argued that the epistolary novel deserves to be treated as more than an isolated episode in literary history; that its style, and especially the way it represents consciousness, significantly influenced the development of the novel. The spread of free indirect thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the subject of thorough and frequent investigation.1 Space does not permit another account of this history here. Instead this Postscript turns to a twentieth-century American novel which encapsulates the major arguments of this study. Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) employs a diversity of narrative forms to represent the tensions within consciousness which have been discussed throughout this book. These include both third-person narrative, pervaded by free indirect thought, and Herzog’s own unsent letters, which become increasingly ‘mental’. Through a chaotic mixture of styles, Bellow shows how adept the letter is at representing internal struggle and turbulent psychological conflict.
