The quest for a point of view: the contribution of point of view to style and theme in James's The Portrait of a Lady and Forster's A Passage to India.

Abstract

Pierre Macherey and Tzvetan Todorov have analyzed the work of fiction in terms of a quest, or journey, for a cause, or a truth, which is revealed at the end. This theory has been applied to two novels by Forster and James respectively. It is argued that the cause is a point of view or a state of mind and that the quest is developed through the point of view of the characters and of the narrator. Consequently, point of view is not only the cause of the narration, it also plays a very important part in how that narration is put forward to ,and perceived by the reader. Finally, this treatment of point of view is a reflection of the authors' own quest for the work of fiction which embodied most perfectly the ideals of the modernist age of which they form part.