The Collector Critical Essay | Dominique Costa

SOURCE: "Narrative Voice and Focalization: The Presentation of the Different Selves in John Fowles' The Collector," in Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, edited by Philip Shaw and Peter Stock-well, Pinter Publishers, 1991, pp. 113-20.

In the essay below, Costa analyzes Fowles's narrative technique and delineation of character in The Collector.

In 1963 the publication of The Collector initiated John Fowles' career as a full-time writer. In [this] first novel the story of Frederick Clegg, an emotionally disturbed young man from an unhappy lower middle-class family, and of Miranda Grey, an attractive art student from an upper-class family, is recounted to us in a most distinctive manner.

The aim of this paper is to examine Fowles' use of two specific narrative devices—voice and focalization—in order to present in a realistic way two fundamentally different selves, Clegg's and Miranda's; one static and destructive, the other striving for...
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