![]() William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. Abstract I argue that given a plausible reading of John Williams’s Stoner (2012 1965) the novel throws light on the demands and costs of pursuing a strategy for self-realisation along Platonic. ![]() Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. ![]() And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents his career is stymied his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family.
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