Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, she examines the novel's intricate narrative structure and its relationship to Nathan's search for self.

Prior to the twentieth century, authors traditionally structured their novels to reflect their belief in the stability of character and the intelligibility of experience. By the end of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), for example, Elizabeth Bennet has discovered and acknowledged her true self while proving the novel's ultimate affirmation that young people get the marital partners they deserve. Novelists in the twentieth century, however, have challenged these assumptions about stability and intelligibility as they expanded the genre's traditional form to accommodate their characters' questions about the nature of truth. Modernists of the first several decades and postmodernists later in the century structured their narratives to trace their characters' internal quest for an authentic self and to illuminate...