Thackeray's writing is important for being governed by an intense historical awareness that constantly reveals itself in the precise, concrete detail of an evoked visible world, but also in a persistent consciousness of the flow of time, which ages both things and human experience, diminishing both and calling the value of both into question. Here Thackeray gives eloquent and pronounced articulation to several of the most deeply rooted Victorian, and indeed modern, concerns. In creative tension with this historical awareness, moreover, is Thackeray's satire, which is not limited and local but beyond time and place, radically challenging the reader's most fundamental assumptions about human life, but doing so in a voice that always evokes a personal- human presence alongside the reader. He therefore gave a new prominence to the commentary of narrative personae and so offered a permanently valuable counterstance to what later came to be their pronounced opposites in the impressive dramatic novels of Henry James. Finally, one can see the importance of the wit and philosophical irony of Thackeray's fictional voices, with the constant shifting of perspective that alone can mediate to the reader the profound indeterminacy at the heart of his writing—an indeterminacy that finds its counterpart in much subsequent literature.
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