Defoe: Novak: Innovator of Fictional form

I must say that I agree with almost everybody else about The Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe was not particularly captivating or engaging to me. However, I did appreciate his sense of accuracy in describing environments, as I felt that I could hear the sounds he heard and feel the things he felt. Yet, at the same time, his obsession with detail frustrated me and almost lost me early in the work.

However, I chose to examine Defoe's work in light of Max Novak's essay "Defoe as an innovator of fictional form." Novak points out that Defoe seems to achieve his purpose of describing the years of the plague in London in a way that was not just purely entertaining and that sucked the gravity of the situation in London at the time out of the story. He postulates that Defoe wrote to adequately portray the city of London in those years of plague. I found this to be particularly true, at least in my opinion. I feel like Defoe used his narrator H. F to show us the city in a way that was descriptive in deep depth as well as plausible and almost realistic. By this I mean that - as Novak points out - Defoe writes about the scene in which certain women raid his brother's warehouse, and amidst the disease and plague indulge themselves in trying on the hats in the room. So, as a reader I felt like this was a brief comic relief, if I might call it that. In essence, while it is apparent that Defoe is using his narrator H. F to tell of the calamities of 1665 London, he does it in a way that provides the reader an expansive view of the events of the Plague including the acts that might be considered too ordinary to attract attention in view of the death and dying taking place. I will say that I was engrossed by Behn's Oroonoko as well as Haywood's Fantomina. Defoe was markedly different to me. This was mainly because he described in too much detail things that I did not particularly care too much about and his story was not of a bright and sunny event. However, I still managed to be able to appreciate his writing style and can see why Novak refers to him as "innovator of fictional form." I see Defoe, at least in relation to the two other authors we have read, as a slight departure from the romantic style, with its fanciful descriptions and common themes to the narration of an event that is ugly and unappealing. I think he performed the task well in that he succeeded in entertaining his readers as well as enlightening them. I think that this might be why Novak sees A Journal of the Plague Year as the first historical fiction. He also tells his story using detail that a reader might not see as useful or just as burdensome, which brings the story closer to everydayness, as numerous events are always taking place around us at any given time, though we might not pay as much attention as Defoe's narrators do to the intrinsic details. His plot also contains some events that I think the story can do without; yet he tells them. I can see how he finds that necessary because life is actually full of such details. In drawing the curtain to a close, I did not really enjoy the reading but I do appreciate Defoe's style.