Abstract As critics of both realism and modernism have argued, the history of the modern novel may be read as a series of aesthetic responses to the epistemological problem of other minds. Beginning with a reading of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, this article argues that some contemporary novelists, driven by the same impulse to sweep away residual storytelling conventions that led modernists to limit and complicate narratorial omniscience, have chosen to write in a first-person present tense, discarding free indirect discourse and the interior monologue. This present-tense style—which the author calls “document style” to include those fictions, like Nabokov's, that are conscious of their own textuality without being strictly epistolary—derives from eighteenth-century, prerealist models that refuse to grant readers a superhuman intersubjective knowledge. Rather than staging the opacity of other minds at the level of plot, document-style novelists withhold traditional novelistic closure, abandoning their readers to a state of unknowing that formally reproduces the privacy of other minds. Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being serves as an allegory of reading this document mode, demonstrating that limiting the traditional avenues of access to the inner lives of fictional characters does not necessarily weaken the illusion that these characters are real people with psychological depth.
Jack Bradford (Fri,) studied this question.