Open Collections

Stevens, Noah Franklin

University of British Columbia

Throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, there has been an increase in critical attention paid to Richard Yates, the New York-born author whose writing career stretched from the 1950s up to his death in 1992. There is still, however, a lack of scholarship dedicated to understanding Yates in his own right and the mechanisms driving the bleak and devastating emotional impacts of his writing. This thesis examines two of Yates’ novels, Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, for their depictions of what Yates, in a 1972 interview with Ploughshares, termed “real suffering” (qtd. Clark and Henry). This thesis argues that depictions of real suffering in Yates’ novels rely on the author’s method of foregrounding the characters, an approach central to George Levine’s description of realism and György Lukács’ theory of the novel. This thesis examines Yates in light of these discussions of genre, also bringing in the Aristotelian view of tragedy, to examine exactly how Yates achieves such moving depictions of realistic and novelistic suffering. In Yates’ work, the foregrounding of character entails a consistent acceptance and understanding on the part of the narrator of the ways characters conceive of their own lives, the interactions between developed characters with differing conceptions of themselves and each other, and the importance these conceptions and conflicting conceptions have for the development of the plot. Drawing on tools from cognitive linguistics, such as Narrative Spaces Theory and intersubjectivity, this thesis tracks how Yates creates incredibly heart-breaking depictions of an interior, mental suffering not from the intrusion of evil but from the everyday interactions of people trying to navigate life in a way that satisfies them. The emotional force of Yates’ writing therefore lies in the terrifyingly realistic and understandable tragedy that can arise from the everyday interactions of ordinary people.

Text

2023-10-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86159

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/