ABSTRACT
John Edgar Wideman’s PEN/Faulkner award-winning novels Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire offer two differing visions of black inner-city life grounded in the contrasting chronotopes that dominate them. While fragmented in point of view, Sent for You Yesterday, the final volume in the Homewood Trilogy and set in Pittsburgh, flows in and out of various consciousnesses, in a stream of conscious style, reminding one of the rolling flow of a jazz piano. This flow allows the present tense of the novel to reach back to the past, building a history and a communal consciousness within the text that takes place in the deteriorated, deteriorating neighborhood of Homewood. These voices include that of the narrator, who is trying to reconnect with his family and neighborhood. In this novel, time gives form to place and community. Philadelphia Fire, on the other hand, ranges spatially far from the streets of Philadelphia, as far as Greece and Spain in the protagonist’s attempts to come to terms with the MOVE bombing of 1985 and his own alienation. Temporally, Philadelphia Fire is almost totally limited in scope to a span of twenty years, from the mid-sixties to the time immediately following the bombing and fire. It is a highly fragmented work, made up of a number of voices, including samplings from other writers, which do not always connect in any apparently logical, linear narrative coherence.
