II.

What Is a Novel?

Writers have pushed traditional literary boundaries so that the characteristics of many types of literature overlap, but looking at certain differences between novels and other literary forms can give readers a basic guide to the novel’s distinctive traits.

Like the short story, the novel tells a story, but unlike the short story, it presents more than an episode. In a novel, the writer has the freedom to develop plot, characters, and theme slowly. The novelist can also surround the main plot with subplots that flesh out the tale. Unlike short stories, most novels have numerous shifts in time, place, and focus of interest.

Like epic poetry, the novel may celebrate grand designs or great events, but unlike epic poetry it also may pay attention to details of everyday life, such as people's daily tasks and social obligations. For example, the epic the Iliad by ancient Greek poet Homer depicts the Trojan War in grand terms but does not comment on the experience of the common soldiers. By contrast, in his novel Madame Bovary (1857), French writer Gustave Flaubert shows the main character shopping and worrying about household expenses.

Like a playwright, a novelist tells a story, but a novelist has more freedom than a playwright to portray events outside the framework of the immediate story, such as historical events that happen at the same time as the story. The playwright is more limited in this way because description in dramas is generally conveyed through dialogue between characters. In a play, rarely does a narrator speak directly to the audience, as the narrator of a novel can. Novelists can also make smoother changes in time and place than can playwrights, who must write their works so that they can be performed on stage.

Like the people in the Bible, the novel’s characters may search for God and have their own particular dreams and ideals, but unlike many biblical characters, the characters in novels are generally presented as people without spiritual missions and destinies. For example, in the Bible, the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah call on the Hebrew people to live more righteously. By contrast, although the character Levin in Anna Karenina (1875-1877) by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is obsessed with the moral life, he is also a farmer, thinker, husband, and society man who must attend to the needs of everyday life.

Unlike writers of allegories or parables, novelists do not use characters solely as emblems. The biblical parable of the prodigal son, which tells of a man who forgives his son for the errors of his ways, explores ideas of Christian forgiveness but does not investigate the characters of the family members in great detail. By contrast, the works of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which also explore themes of forgiveness, demonstrate the anguish of guilt-ridden men and women. In Dostoyevsky’s Prestuplanie i nakazanie (1866; Crime and Punishment) a man commits a murder and escapes punishment from authorities. However, he still suffers because his own conscience is burdened by the knowledge of the wrong he has done.

Finally, the novel may adapt patterns of mythology, but the novelist does not simply retell the myth. Instead, the novelist structures the story around the underlying themes of the myth while featuring unique characters and settings. In Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce, the experiences of the character Leopold Bloom have some similarity to those of the hero Odysseus in the Odyssey by ancient Greek poet Homer. But Bloom’s experiences take place entirely within his world—the Ireland of his time. Joyce thus uses the ancient material of Odysseus’s mythical experiences to create a new interpretation of contemporary experience.