The interaction of the self with the world is traditionally reflected in literature. The literary works that will be explored in this study belong to the first half of the twentieth century. They all differ from the narrative style of most novels of the nineteenth century. In his classroom lectures, my teacher Baruch Kurzweil kept reiterating that the most important change that took place was the shift of focus from the subject of society to the inner life of the protagonists. Society still counted, but in twentieth-century novels, readers could learn about it not from direct descriptions by the authors, but only from the way society was experienced by the protagonists. At this point we should add that, with this narrowing of the focus on the individual, personal identity became the exploratory target of the modern novel. In consequence of this, the literary use of memory in the individual’s search for identity received a quantum jump. Henceforward, memory played an indispensable role in the psychological hunt for lost components of one’s identity. What is more, the growing literary resort to memory had an impact on the time dimension. As we shall see with the protagonists of Thomas Wolfe and Virginia Woolf in the course of their identity quest, the contiguity of times tended to assert itself while the importance of chronology receded. The self is, after all, a mosaic of related contents that are integrated and preserved in accordance with their relevance to one’s identity. And in the attempt to discover, reconstruct, and put together this rich mosaic, the important issue for each added component is what happened rather than when it happened. In other words, the reconstruction of the whole need not follow the chronological order of the parts. 

These basic changes in the art of the novel did not happen by chance. They reflected deep psychocultural undercurrents that came to the fore during the early part of the twentieth century….

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