The Postmodernist Narrative Techniques in John Fowles’s The Collector The English novelist John Fowles (1926-2005) was educated at Oxford and then started teaching English at different universities in the UK and Greece. When his first novel The Collector (1963) was published and became a big success , he left his job and devoted his time to writing. The Collector’s first draft development was influenced by two events. The first one when Fowles attended Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911). Similar to The Collector’s story, the opera talks about women who are imprisoned by a man. Bartók’s opera as Sherrill E. Grace states in his article “Courting Bluebeard with Bartók , Atwood , and Fowles : Modern Treatment of the Bluebeard Theme ,” is “ a modern adaptation of the Bluebeard theme that has frequently appeared in literature and other forms of art since the medieval age,” (Grace 1984 ,247). The Bluebeard theme concerns with the violence of man against women. “I went to see the first performance [in the 1950s] in London of Bartók’s opera , Bluebeard's Castle . It wasn’t a very good performance , but the thing that struck me was the symbolism of the man imprisoning women underground,” ( Vipond , 219) this is what Fowles said in an interview commenting on Bartók’s opera. The second event as Woodcock notes that Fowles read a newspaper report about a young man who kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for more than three months and Fowles said that “There were many peculiar features about this case that fascinated me,” (Fowles quoted in Woodcock 1984 , 27). The story of The Collector is about the kidnapping of Miranda Grey by Frederic Clegg , the only two main characters in the nove... ... middle of paper ... ... and Power : The Hegelian Themes in John Fowles’s The Collector.” Georgia 2005 : 7. Lytard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Maszák, Szegedy. “Non-teleological Narration”. Bertens ,ed, 1997. Mockridge , Rowland . “Smell of Success Makes Him Nervous.” New York World Telegram 19 September 1963 : 21. Nodelman , Perry. “John Fowles’s Variations in The Collector.” Contemporary Literature 28 ,1987 : 332-46. Olshen , Barry N. John Fowles. Modern Literature Monographs. New York : Ungar , 1978 :16. Sultan , Sabbar S. “The Controversy of Sciences : Humanities Revisited.” IJAPS November 2008 : 4. Tarbox ,Katherine . The Art of John Fowles. Athens :University of Georgia Press,1988. Woodcock, Bruce. Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1984. Print.
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The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
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