Collective Forms of Storytelling in Suburban Novels
Abstract
This article explores the public dimension of dwelling in two American suburban novels that employ collective forms of storytelling and exemplify the deep entanglement between narrative form and sense of place. Drawing on research at the intersection of narratology and new formalism, the article will demonstrate the inextricable relationship between narrative form and spatiality. While sociocultural representations of suburban space have typically understood it as a static backdrop, the analysis focuses on four strategies displayed by the we-narrative in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides to convey a deeper understanding of the collective experience of the suburbs.
The article then discusses the spatial forms underlying Eugenides’s novel and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. While the former builds on the spatial form of the whole as a site for negotiating individual and collective experience, The Ice Storm relies on the form of the hierarchical network to represent the spatial and sexual entanglement of dysfunctional suburban families while formally disrupting it through pseudo-multiperspectivity.
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