SOURCE: "The Problem of Unity in Fiction: Narrator and Self in María," in MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, March, 1986, pp. 342-53.

In the following essay, Williams surveys earlier criticism of Isaacs's María and discusses narrative unity and fragmentation in the novel.

The assumptions underlying critical thought on Jorge Isaacs' classic novel María (1867) have been quite traditional. During much of the twentieth century studies were limited to the sources of the book, comparisons or influences of European models or thematic and biographical investigations.¹ A moribund line of thought maintained that its numerous deviations from the principal story line undermined its effectiveness as a coherent novel.² A more recent reading by Seymour Menton has meticulously diagrammed relationships that demonstrate the book's unity.³ The least traditional of these analyses is John S. Brushwood's explicitly Barthesian exposition of codes of character definition.⁴ The present study will consider briefly both the assumptions...