Plot as repetition: John Irving's narrative experiments. From: CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction | Date: September 22, 1995| Author: Shostak, Debra | COPYRIGHT 1995 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

John Irving's repetitive phrases and images that consciously become motifs within and cross over his novels are literary tics worth examining especially if taken in relation to his novels' endings and beginnings. Using Peter Brooks' analysis of the narrative text as a psychic entity, Irving's narrative repetitions can be read as plot determinism. That is, everything has already been set from beginning to end, or in his case, as he himself said, the end is already determined even before the be...

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	Plot as repetition: John Irving's narrative experiments. CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction ; Sorrow floats. So claims the narrator of John Irving's novel, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). Sorrow is the flatulent Labrador retriever who dies but does not disappear, the free-floating dog of anxiety whose remains come to the surface even after the airplane he rides in plunges into the sea.
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