Moon Tiger | Themes

Moon Tiger Themes

While Moon Tiger provides rich characterizations, settings, and social themes, its primary concern is with epistemology. In this novel Lively takes to a radical extreme the ideas about history, time, and reality that she more tentatively addressed in her six earlier novels.

At the novel's outset, seventy-sixyear-old Claudia, who is lying in a hospital bed dying of cancer, makes the startling announcement, "I am writing a history of the world." Although we at first assume, as does the patronizing nurse who is attending her at the time, that this is just the deluded rambling of senility, by the end of the novel we realize that Claudia has in fact given us a history of the world of sorts. That is, the mixture of personal memories, flashbacks, and ruminations about historical events that constitutes both Claudia's consciousness and the book itself effects the kind of historical account that this...
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