SOURCE: “Ventriloquist's Act: Frank Moorhouse's ‘Pledges, Vows and Pass This Note,’” in Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines, Vol. XXI, 1988, pp. 97-112.

In the following essay, Vauthier offers a close reading of Moorhouse's short story “Pledges, Vows and Pass the Note,” and analyzes thematic and stylistic aspects of the story.

By now, the relevance to “post-modernist” fiction of John Hawkes's “assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme” hardly needs pointing out.¹ That in the process of doing away with the old elements of narrative, contemporary fictionists have also been playing games with the traditional “modes” has not received as much critical attention.² Yet in many short stories, description has often taken over from report, or comment—including narratorial comment, that bugaboo—recovered a place it had lost in modernist fiction. In “Pledges, Vows and Pass this Note,” Australian writer Frank Moorhouse offers a...