![]() ![]() Jude is in the first year of law school when “his life began appearing to him as memories”: “A scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him.”īut Jude’s self-interest is something which we as readers will excuse, in the aftermath of the last 20 years of child abuse memoirs and fictions, because of the abuse he has sustained. Nothing, surely, can be more interesting to others than one’s own self-discovery. ![]() ![]() ![]() This fascination with self-discovery is a necessary part of the Bildungsroman narrative, but has also been exacerbated by the now century-old popular fascination with psychoanalysis. The effects of childhood abuse, neglect and terror are played out in these relationships, in which Jude both finds great love and, at times, struggles to understand his place within. The protagonist Jude’s early life, initially teasingly and then increasingly abruptly, is positioned in counterpoint to the adult Jude’s negotiation of relationships. Hanya Yanagihara’s Booker-shortlisted A Little Life (2015) should be located within this somewhat creaky tradition. It can be traced back through Jane Eyre to the origins of the novel with Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). The Bildungsroman, narratives that trace the relationship between child and adulthood, certainly has a long-standing, if never subtle, presence in the history of the novel in English. “The Child is father of the Man,” as Wordsworth’s famous axiom goes. ![]()
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