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Articles

Volume 05, Number 1 (1980)

Narrative Technique in Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House

  • Paul Denham
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1980-01-01

Abstract

Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House has been read alternately as a regional, realist novel, and as a symbolic one. The difficulties for the reader that arise from this contradiction perhaps suggests that the narrative is imperfectly handled by Ross. The author strains at the limits of the epistolary or diaristic convention by making the reader usually "forget" that s/he is reading a diary. The novel appears to be a realist work of fiction, but there are many details -- and omissions -- which stretch the limits of realism, and which suggest a symbolic aspect that exists at the expense of realism. Mrs. Bentley, as narrator, may or may not be unreliable: there is, simply, no way of telling whether lucidity or obtuseness is the keynote of her character. The ambiguity of the novel is such that the reader can speculate endlessly, with little help or direction from the author.