The Adventures of Augie March

*Lack of coherent plot is intentional. It is a picaresque novel. Plotlessness is part of

the point
Invisible Man
*Idea that blacks can progress as long as long as they recognize whites as superior
*He recognize his invisibility. The narrator realizes that he can have multiple
identitiesthat's the benefit of being invisible.
The Man Who Studied Yoga
* But then he thinks of the novel he wants to write, and he is wide-awake again. Like
the sleeping pill which fails to work and leaves one warped in an exaggeration of
the ills which sought the drug, Sam passes through the promise of sex-emptied
sleep, and is left with nervous loins, swollen jealousy of an act ten years dead, and
sweating irritable resentment of the woman's body which hinders his limbs. He has
wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many
days of his life, and tomorrow in the office he will be no more than his ten fingers
typing plot and words for Bramba the Venusian and Lee-Lee Deeds, Hllywood Star,
while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, holding it before him as a
covenant of his worth, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from
the impasse in which he stiffles, whose dozens of [p. 172] characters would develop
a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundered, rotting on a beach of
purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of
incidental ideas and half-epsodes, utterly withour shape. He has not even a hero for
it.
Life-Story
Barths approach of creating metafiction as response to supposedly exhausted
literary topics is highlighted. Fiction, consisting of forms as equivalent of existence
in being, and consisting of thoughts as equivalent of essence in being, cannot
basically change until essence in being itself will change. As forms will only repeat
again and again, Barth challenges the reader by having him witness the demanding
process of creating a work of art. Varying the kuenstlerroman, he anticipates
identity issues of subsequent decades as well as issues of being and art.
Slighterhouse five

It took me a while to warm up to Vonnegut's laconic, sardonic, seemingly detached

tone in the context of war in general and the 1945 bombing of Dresden in particular.
Once the charm of his deceptively simple writing had won me over, though, I
started to feel the powerful anti-war message - delivered very effectively from the
seemingly resigned and alienated perspective of a war veteran.
Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five.
As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors of war while
simultaneously laughing at some of the absurd situations it can generate. Mostly,

Vonnegut wants the reader to recognize the fact that one has to accept things as
they happen because no one can change the inevitable.