What we are: Interpreting personhood in the experimental novels of Conrad, Faulkner, and Naipaul

This dissertation establishes a new way of interpreting experimental styles of literature in the context of an ever deepening human crisis---a crisis marked, above all, by a diminishment of our moral potential, of the aims of moral reasoning, and our personal fates. Rather than analyzing the relationship between ideas of identity and the politics of literary style, however, I develop a picture of the imperilment of our personhood---of our personalities and moral characters, our ways of reasoning and our agency---relative to the narrative experiments of three 20th century novels. Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival stand as deep expressions of an emerging loss of our ethical ways of talking about ourselves, and subsequently, of the moral resources necessary for making choices, judgments, and responsible lives for ourselves. What the trajectory of ideas and concerns about personhood these novels trace offers us is an important record of the human crises we still face. In recovering that record in this dissertation, I not only offer a way of understanding the literature that dares to show it to us, I reveal personhood as a fundamental part of our understanding of what we are.