Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
Kurt Vonnegut's perennial semi-autobiographical protagonist returns this time as Walter F. Starbuck, and he is a Harvard man. He is so much a Harvard man, in fact, that were Vonnegut less obvious in writing his titles this book might well be called Kilgore Trout Goes to Harvard. Vonnegut's hero still peacefully accepts life's highs and lows, but Harvard has changed him: the lows seem a little lower, the highs a little higher, and the accepting a little harder...
...still want to assay the bulk of Letters--out of a sentimental attachment to Barth's brilliant earlier epic-length efforts, Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor, or out of sheer quixotic nerve--you could take the advice of Jacob Horner, formerly the protagonist of The End of the Road and now a pawn wandering Barth's checkerboard...
...when the McKay expedition sets out, the West seemed a welcoming, fertile frontier. McMahon so skillfully intertwines fact and fiction that the experience of his protagonist is not merely typical; it is vivid, and exacting, and the two strands are often hard to sort out from one another...
TAKE A FAMOUS CHARACTER as protagonist, add a wife and kids and a few servants, mix in a fair amount of imagined 'typical daily life' and arrive at the typewriter with the ready made historical novel. Thus we learn how Freud puts on his shirt, or how Lincoln liked his eggs. Our interest in these quotidian events lies mainly in the protagonist's eventual fame or historical dimensions...