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Adam Fox's avatar

I'm not someone who is particularly familiar with Dickens's work. That being said, I have the impression that a certain peculiarity in his sensibility—perhaps what we might call his "wit"—is notably detached from the point of view of his characters. It's as if Dickens's narrator were an omniscient voice that could only speak about the characters in an ironic tone, without ever allowing their perspective to emerge. This stands in stark contrast to Gustave Flaubert’s use of free indirect style in "Madame Bovary". In the twentieth century, I recognize this same "dissociation of sensibility," as Eliot would call it, in the work of Evelyn Waugh. Perhaps the remedy lies in a fusion of Flaubertian sensibility with Sternean irony—a combination that, I believe, was quite successfully achieved by the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, particularly in "Epitaph of a Small Winner".

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