SOURCE: “Memory, the Divided Self, and Revelatory Resolution in Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County,” in Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County, edited by David D. Anderson, The Midwestern Press, 1998, pp. 77-83.

In the following essay, Noverr discusses internal tension and the division of self in the protagonist of Raintree County.

In her 1988 work titled Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels Joyce A. Rowe finds a fairly consistent and repeated pattern in the endings of classic American novels that enables one to speak of “the American sense of an ending.” In this pattern the protagonist of each of the stories is presented as an “idealist” or “visionary” who “in the course of the tale … is defeated, as much by his or her own limitations as by society. … Yet these endings all adhere to a similar convention: they redeem or rehabilitate the ideal by...