Title: The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965

Author: Joan Stevens

Publication details: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 1966

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Sylvia Johnston

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

Conditions of use

Share:

Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965

Pilgrim's Dream

page 71

Pilgrim's Dream. The title is from Bunyan: "Now I saw in my Dream, that at the end of this Valley lay blood, bones, ashes and mangled bodies of men, even of Pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; ..." And again, "Now I saw in my Dream, that ... the Pilgrims were got over the Enchanted Ground; and entering into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant ..."

In this novel the first-person point of view is abandoned, but not the intention of making the reader feel as if he were within the chief character's consciousness. The method reminds us of that in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There Joyce presents Stephen Dedalus in the third person, but contrives by various devices to place us inside Stephen's experience. There is interior monologue, verbal echo, thematic repetition, and considerable heightening of the prose style.

Frank Sargeson adopts the method of interior monologue but avoids any poetic heightening, and keeps to the flat colloquialisms which his central figure may be supposed to use, for speech or for thinking. When flashbacks into the hero's inner mental world occur, they are indicated in italics. Dialogue, too, is filtered through his mind, so that nobody really is alive in the novel but the protagonist, Henry-Dave.

To appreciate both Sargeson's debt to Joyce, and his difference of method, readers may find it useful to compare the first few pages of the two novels: similarly, to read Sargeson and Hemingway in association is most illuminating.