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Lack Of Truth In Fiction: Frank Norris's Mcteague, Carolyn Payne
Lack Of Truth In Fiction: Frank Norris's Mcteague, Carolyn Payne
Liberal Studies (MA) Final Essays
American author Frank Norris declared in his 1902 essay, Responsibilities of the Novelist, that the writer owed it to the reader to provide him with truth in his storytelling. To quote, “It is not right that they be exploited with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history…” Yet, only three years earlier Norris published his novel, McTeague: The Story of San Francisco, in which he portrayed characters of various ethnicities as falsely as could be imagined. The characters were written as exaggerated caricatures, defective human beings of lesser races. This essay examines what …