The Topography of the Crisis and the Narrative Possibilities

Typological Variations in Paulo Scott’s Novels

Abstract

Based on an analysis of the presence of typological variations in the relationship between characters and plot in Paulo Scott’s novels, this article aims to demonstrate how the composition of characters who suffer from an “identity crisis” serves the realization of different narrative possibilities. Drawing on concepts taken from narratological studies, the analysis aims to demonstrate how Scott, by producing an entanglement between the composition of central characters in crisis and the conduct of the narrative, ends up producing new paths for the contemporary novel, opening spaces of intersection between the characters’ interiority and the characters’ external determinations. The identity crisis, constituted in a way to intersect the existential and the social, is employed by Scott in order to produce multiplicities, renewing literary trends without falling back into metanarrative or even self-referential discourses.