Objective Realism In Henry James's Novel

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Historically speaking, focalization, though in various guises, is not a new terminology. From Henry James onwards, there has been felt that the narrator has not been the only omniscient agent to narrate the story; sometimes, it is necessary to let the character reflect on the story. On the one hand, there are some modern writers like Woolf, Richardson, Joyce, and Faulkner, amongst many others, who, turning away from the traditional way of novel-writing, in which the stress was laid much on thee external world than the inner world of the characters, came to depict a kind of realism completely different from the objective realism of the external world: ‘mental or ‘subjective realism’, in which the emphasis was on the ‘impressionism’ and/or ‘expressionism’. …show more content…

The mind receives a myriad of impressions -- trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides, they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms... Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however, disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incidence scores upon the consciousness (1924, …show more content…

With an ‘internal focalization’, subdivided into the ‘fixed’, ‘variable’, and ‘multiple’, and corresponded with Todorov’s Narrator=Character, the narrator is also a character in the story and says what that character knows or can

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