2014/01/01 by Greg Roy Buchanan · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Themes in Literature Analysis #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies #Short Stories in Global Literature
paper · doi:10.1057/9781137349552_4
openalex publication_date 2014/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
To read any prose novel is to bring together and synthesise disparate details from a given sequence in the text; to read B.S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates is to perform this reconstruction in a particularly explicit and s elf-aware fashion. The narrative is composed of a series of bound sections contained within a box, all the sections but the first and last being readable in random order. They present Johnson’s reflections on the death of his friend Tony Tillinghast from cancer and his memories of the city in which they spent time together, with the random chance-based form of the novel’s sequences acting as a tangible metaphor for both the workings of memory and the metastasis of cancer. Figures on the periphery of these central depictions, such as Tony’s wife June and Johnson’s fictionalised former girlfriend Wendy, may seem unreal to many readers in comparison with Johnson’s own self-representation. If, as critics such as Kaye Mitchell (2007: 56) claim, the novel’s sequences do not create radically different readings from one another, the mere fact of this multiplicity would not in itself cause difficulties in reader construction of character. B.S. Johnson’s prose style may be more responsible for such difficulties, working in tandem with this multiplicity of sequence to denaturalise the concept of sequential character development in which most modern literary work and theory have been invested.