SOURCE: “Character as Revealed Cliché in Wright Morris's Fiction,” in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Summer, 1981, pp. 319-36.

In the following essay, Madden argues that Morris's “manipulation of clichés” is at the root of his power to render “the sensibilities of articulate and inarticulate characters” effectively.

Morris says, in The Territory Ahead, “Every writer who is sufficiently self-aware to know what he is doing, and how he does it sooner or later is confronted with the dictates of style. If he has a style, it is the style that dictates what he says. What he says, of course, is how he says it …” (137). No American writer's style, I think, is as perfectly controlled as Morris's. Everything style has been trained over the centuries to do, Morris makes it do in his novels. If Hodler, one of his more articulate characters, “admits to the frailty of language...