Form in the 20th Century - Extra Credit

To say that I grew up in a revolutionary generation would be somewhat accurate.  To the extent of my memory, some of the greatest advances in technology, social issues, and modern life have come to pass when I was in my early years.  This fact does not go by the wayside when it comes to literature and modern novels.  In fact, I’ve come to realize through this class and others in my past education that the definition of a novel just has to include at least a little wiggle room when it comes to form.  Too much creativity would be lost if the concept of form hadn’t morphed with the times.

Reading works of pure artistry like Beloved, Woman Warrior, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I’ve come to realize that many important 20^th century novels, and even 21^st century novels in the case of Foer, have forms that require the reader to firstly pay much more attention to the speakers at the present moment, and secondly to realize what the form is saying about the larger novel as a whole.  For example, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, there are three sections that all start with the phrase “I am Beloved and she is mine”.  It takes several additional lines of reading to realize which woman in the novel is speaking, Beloved, Sethe, or Denver.  The mystery upon starting these sections, however, was enough to grab me and make me want to read it again when I was done.  Each of these three women who speak in this somewhat confusing section all have such a distinct way of telling stories and have such different lives throughout the novel that once identified are easy to tell apart, but starting each of the sections with the same phrase is one of many items Toni Morrison uses to indicate something greater about her novel and the subject matter. 

Form is one of the hallmarks of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  The pictures, smashed together words, colorful scribbles, flip books, and other mechanisms present in the novel all contribute so greatly to the larger story that it would be difficult to imagine the novel without them.  Oskar Schell’s character depends so greatly on his book of “Stuff That Happened to Me”, a scrapbook of pictures and letters he collected throughout his short life, and with these displays of pictures in the actual novel, the reader has the opportunity to feel like they are going through the motions with Oskar as he goes through them; they are going on this epic journey right alongside him.  Although this is technically a 21^st century novel, Foer uses form to the utmost power he can and it revolutionized the novel and made it so much more affecting to read.