The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell Writing Style & Techniques

This Study Guide consists of approximately 7 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Avignon Quintet.

The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell Writing Style & Techniques

This Study Guide consists of approximately 7 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Avignon Quintet.
This section contains 746 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy The Avignon Quintet Short Guide

T he Avignon Quintet (Monsieur: Or The Prince of Darkness, 1974; Livia: Or Buried Alive, 1979; Constance: Or Solitary Practices, 1982; Sebastian: Or Ruling Passions, 1984; Quinx: Or The Ripper's Tale, 1985) presents a large cast of characters of diverse backgrounds, professions, and ethnicities: doctors, diplomats, novelists, psychoanalysts, Nazis, gypsies, an Egyptian bankergnostic, a Jewish plutocrat, an Egyptian prince. Most of the principle characters have doppelgangers. Although many aspects of the characterization resemble The Alexandria Quartet, it is not so much a matter of prismatic perspective, of retelling the same story from different viewpoints, as Durrell attempted in The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), as it is a duplication and reduplication of character and situation. One of Durrell's writer-narrator figures, Sutcliffe, dreams of writing a book "full of not completely discrete characters, of ancestors and descendants all mixed up," who would "walk in and out of each other's lives"; it would be a...

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This section contains 746 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy The Avignon Quintet Short Guide
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