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The Infinite Plan is different than Allende's other works: the protagonist, Gregory Reeves, is male and the setting is not in South America but in the United States. In addition, Allende attempts to cover broad historical time periods in the United States: the aftermath of World War II; the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Berkeley, California; the Vietnam War; and the materialistic, yuppie age of the 1980s. Furthermore, the novel is told in retrospect, so the reader does not understand its meaning until the very end. The unusual circumstances of the novel certainly frustrate the typical Allende readers, as they expect a certain pattern and, at the very least, the usual setting. Despite its awkwardness, however. The Infinite Plan deserves serious critical attention and is indeed one of Allende's most fascinating experiments. In particular, the novel presents an extraordinary narrative pattern, one that by itself deserves attention and thus becomes the focus of this thesis.
Complexity in narrative structure is by no means atypical of Allende's works of fiction. The House of Spirits has three narrators, the most important one being Alba, who recounts her family history based on what she has discovered in her grandmother's diary. Eva Luna, the female protagonist of Allende's third novel, Eva Luna, narrates The Stories of Eva Luna, and her collection of stories exists for and is dedicated to her lover, Rolf Carle. Critics have studied the intricate narrative patterns in Allende's worlds and praised her for her ingenuity. The narrative structure of The Infinite Plan is equally as complex and challenging. The story has two official narrators: Gregory Reeves and his unnamed, female lover. Although Reeves is the protagonist, he narrates only thirteen brief sections within the novel, sections which range in length from three pages to ten. Thus, the female omniscient narrator is the primary narrator. The novel is told in retrospect, so that Reeves' story slowly unfolds. The narrator drops clues along the way, but she only reveals her relationship to Reeves in the last paragraph of the novel. In addition to the two formal narrators, a variety of narrative presences also inform the text.
The importance of the complex narrative structure goes beyond its mere existence: the novel, despite its male protagonist, supports a feminist agenda.
Allende does not openly rally for political feminist causes, but her novels all concern women's issues. Her female characters are strong, independent women who defy the norms of their patriarchal societies. For example, Eva Luna the female protagonist and narrator of Eva Luna, overcomes a childhood of poverty and, by the end of the novel, succeeds in becoming a well-known writer of popular soap operas. Irene Baltran in Of Love and Shadows is an energetic journalist who alters the image of women as submissive and silent beings.
In addition, Allende's writing seeks to identify its own female voice, the central struggle of the literary feminist movement of the twentieth century. Women have long attacked male dominance in society and in literature. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own that men have excluded women from the literary process and have taken it upon themselves to describe for women their female experiences. Woolf writes: “If women had no existence save in fiction written by men, we would imagine her to be a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is women in fiction”.
As Woolf projected early in the feminist movement, in order for women to be depicted fairly and accurately in novels, women must establish a room of their own in a male-dominated literary tradition. Thus, recent feminist criticism has moved from revealing patriarchal dominance and sexism in society and literature to studying women as writers, women writing for women and about women.
Thus, critics have taken serious steps in looking at women as contributors to the field of literature, both in their subject matter and in their style and language.
Word choice, descriptions, paragraphs, dialogue, content and even narrative pattern do not have to follow a structured notion of logic and organization.
Instead, women's writing is something different, something that exists in the very nature of being female. Feminists have not agreed upon or readily defined the female voice, and some are not ready to equate female writing with biology. However, many female writers, including Allende, are indeed ignoring traditional forms of writing and searching for an inner voice.
Her attempt to write with a feminine voice sometimes confuses an ignorant reading audience. John Butt in The Times Literary Supplement reacted violently to the overtly sexual passages in The Stories of Eva Luna: "Isabel Allende's numerous erotic passages are actually quite well dome. She might do better to write straight pornographic books without apologetic romantic adornments" (8 Feb 1991). Despite the negative criticism, Allende holds true to her writing as a woman. Even if she does not align herself in one camp or another of feminism, she believes women must express themselves as women and not as women speaking on behalf of a sexist society.
Thus, in all of her novels, Allende presents a feminist agenda: a desire to change the way women write and read literature. Her subject matter concerns the issues of women: rape, love, childbirth, motherhood, sexual enjoyment, and the feminist movement all weave themselves into her novels. She writes descriptively, romantically, and even majestically, ignoring criticism that her stories wander or are disjointed. As I will explain, in The Infinite Plan, she creates a narrative structure that, in the end, allows for the victory of the female approach to understanding life.
The story of The Infinite Plan involves the troubled life of Gregory Reeves. He spends his entire adult life trying to escape his childhood memories of incest within his family and the brutal machismo of the barrio.
His inability to cope leads to unrequited love for women, resulting in unwanted and unloved children, and a painful tour in Vietnam. The novel, then, is a healing process for the adult Reeves, who is in his mid-fifties: he tells his story to Ming O'Brien, a psychiatrist, which enables him to tell the story to his lover (the unnamed female narrator), which enables her to reveal the story to us, the readers. Reeves moves from understanding the world from a male's perspective of sexism and controlling emotion to a female's perspective of both feeling emotion and openly expressing it. Guiding him into this realization is the female narrator and all of the feminist and female presences within the novel.
As the lover of Reeves, she has a vested interest in his well-being, but she is more than just a sympathetic character. She controls the text: she fictionalizes his past based on his confessions and allows him only limited space to voice his own story. Ultimately, she determines when he has fully recovered and when he can confidently reveal that new-found health to the reader. She controls the novels and guides Reeves' healing. Chapter IV examines Reeves' narrations, which expose him as a stereotypical male who struggles to escape the masculine realm of lust, power, and destruction. With the assistance of his lover and his psychiatrist, he ultimately recognizes that in order to heal from his painful life, he must surrender to the feminine realm of emotion, love and compassion.
Despite the fact that The Infinite Plan has received little attention from scholars and negative attention from the press, it presents itself as a challenging novel for Allende scholars. Its narrative structure is complex and is by far the most experimental structure that Allende has attempted. Complexity in narrative structure exists in Allende's other works as well. The House of Spirits has three narrators, the most important one of whom is Alba, and The Stories of Eva Luna exists for and is dedicated to the story teller's lover, Rolf Carle, a character who exists in another of Allende's novels, Eva Luna. While The Stories of Eva Luna and The House of Spirits present complicated narrative structures, they do not approach the difficulty of the number of layers of narrative voices in The Infinite Plan. Thus, even if the novel strays from Allende's typical novel, it evidences her growth as a post-modern writer. Her novel demands that readers play an active role.
Allende requires her reader to pay attention and to perhaps re-read the novel in order to follow the process of the narration. For example, Allende carefully withholds the identity of the primary story teller until the end of the novel, but upon re-reading, one finds clues of who she is. A careless reader might disregard the complexity of the novel and merely toss it aside as being too difficult. Perhaps the challenging structure of the novel, along with the difference in setting and protagonist from Allende's other novels, makes it too frustrating to be enjoyable to an avid reader of Allende. However, serious Allende scholars should examine the novel again, particularly in light of its experimental nature.
The Infinite Plan also evidences Allende's growth as a feminist, or at least as a writer concerned about women. She holds true to her intention of breaking the norms of patriarchal language. All of the narrative presences support her feminist theme; these presences include a female omniscient narrator, the feminist reality of the twentieth century, the para text, and Reeves' confessions to his psychiatrist and narrator. The female omniscient narrator controls the novel and undermines the traditional power of a male protagonist and male narrator. Both the narrative presences and the female omniscient narrator guide Reeves on his journey of recovery. Ultimately, Reeves recovers because he discards his sexist behavior, understands the inherent perversion of male sexuality, and learns to value life from a female's perspective. The success of Allende's complicated narration, particularly as it presents its feminist theme, forgives the problems of the readability of the text.
Complexity in narrative structure is by no means atypical of Allende's works of fiction. The House of Spirits has three narrators, the most important one being Alba, who recounts her family history based on what she has discovered in her grandmother's diary. Eva Luna, the female protagonist of Allende's third novel, Eva Luna, narrates The Stories of Eva Luna, and her collection of stories exists for and is dedicated to her lover, Rolf Carle. Critics have studied the intricate narrative patterns in Allende's worlds and praised her for her ingenuity. The narrative structure of The Infinite Plan is equally as complex and challenging. The story has two official narrators: Gregory Reeves and his unnamed, female lover. Although Reeves is the protagonist, he narrates only thirteen brief sections within the novel, sections which range in length from three pages to ten. Thus, the female omniscient narrator is the primary narrator. The novel is told in retrospect, so that Reeves' story slowly unfolds. The narrator drops clues along the way, but she only reveals her relationship to Reeves in the last paragraph of the novel. In addition to the two formal narrators, a variety of narrative presences also inform the text.
The importance of the complex narrative structure goes beyond its mere existence: the novel, despite its male protagonist, supports a feminist agenda.
Allende does not openly rally for political feminist causes, but her novels all concern women's issues. Her female characters are strong, independent women who defy the norms of their patriarchal societies. For example, Eva Luna the female protagonist and narrator of Eva Luna, overcomes a childhood of poverty and, by the end of the novel, succeeds in becoming a well-known writer of popular soap operas. Irene Baltran in Of Love and Shadows is an energetic journalist who alters the image of women as submissive and silent beings.
In addition, Allende's writing seeks to identify its own female voice, the central struggle of the literary feminist movement of the twentieth century. Women have long attacked male dominance in society and in literature. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own that men have excluded women from the literary process and have taken it upon themselves to describe for women their female experiences. Woolf writes: “If women had no existence save in fiction written by men, we would imagine her to be a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is women in fiction”.
As Woolf projected early in the feminist movement, in order for women to be depicted fairly and accurately in novels, women must establish a room of their own in a male-dominated literary tradition. Thus, recent feminist criticism has moved from revealing patriarchal dominance and sexism in society and literature to studying women as writers, women writing for women and about women.
Thus, critics have taken serious steps in looking at women as contributors to the field of literature, both in their subject matter and in their style and language.
Word choice, descriptions, paragraphs, dialogue, content and even narrative pattern do not have to follow a structured notion of logic and organization.
Instead, women's writing is something different, something that exists in the very nature of being female. Feminists have not agreed upon or readily defined the female voice, and some are not ready to equate female writing with biology. However, many female writers, including Allende, are indeed ignoring traditional forms of writing and searching for an inner voice.
Her attempt to write with a feminine voice sometimes confuses an ignorant reading audience. John Butt in The Times Literary Supplement reacted violently to the overtly sexual passages in The Stories of Eva Luna: "Isabel Allende's numerous erotic passages are actually quite well dome. She might do better to write straight pornographic books without apologetic romantic adornments" (8 Feb 1991). Despite the negative criticism, Allende holds true to her writing as a woman. Even if she does not align herself in one camp or another of feminism, she believes women must express themselves as women and not as women speaking on behalf of a sexist society.
Thus, in all of her novels, Allende presents a feminist agenda: a desire to change the way women write and read literature. Her subject matter concerns the issues of women: rape, love, childbirth, motherhood, sexual enjoyment, and the feminist movement all weave themselves into her novels. She writes descriptively, romantically, and even majestically, ignoring criticism that her stories wander or are disjointed. As I will explain, in The Infinite Plan, she creates a narrative structure that, in the end, allows for the victory of the female approach to understanding life.
The story of The Infinite Plan involves the troubled life of Gregory Reeves. He spends his entire adult life trying to escape his childhood memories of incest within his family and the brutal machismo of the barrio.
His inability to cope leads to unrequited love for women, resulting in unwanted and unloved children, and a painful tour in Vietnam. The novel, then, is a healing process for the adult Reeves, who is in his mid-fifties: he tells his story to Ming O'Brien, a psychiatrist, which enables him to tell the story to his lover (the unnamed female narrator), which enables her to reveal the story to us, the readers. Reeves moves from understanding the world from a male's perspective of sexism and controlling emotion to a female's perspective of both feeling emotion and openly expressing it. Guiding him into this realization is the female narrator and all of the feminist and female presences within the novel.
As the lover of Reeves, she has a vested interest in his well-being, but she is more than just a sympathetic character. She controls the text: she fictionalizes his past based on his confessions and allows him only limited space to voice his own story. Ultimately, she determines when he has fully recovered and when he can confidently reveal that new-found health to the reader. She controls the novels and guides Reeves' healing. Chapter IV examines Reeves' narrations, which expose him as a stereotypical male who struggles to escape the masculine realm of lust, power, and destruction. With the assistance of his lover and his psychiatrist, he ultimately recognizes that in order to heal from his painful life, he must surrender to the feminine realm of emotion, love and compassion.
Despite the fact that The Infinite Plan has received little attention from scholars and negative attention from the press, it presents itself as a challenging novel for Allende scholars. Its narrative structure is complex and is by far the most experimental structure that Allende has attempted. Complexity in narrative structure exists in Allende's other works as well. The House of Spirits has three narrators, the most important one of whom is Alba, and The Stories of Eva Luna exists for and is dedicated to the story teller's lover, Rolf Carle, a character who exists in another of Allende's novels, Eva Luna. While The Stories of Eva Luna and The House of Spirits present complicated narrative structures, they do not approach the difficulty of the number of layers of narrative voices in The Infinite Plan. Thus, even if the novel strays from Allende's typical novel, it evidences her growth as a post-modern writer. Her novel demands that readers play an active role.
Allende requires her reader to pay attention and to perhaps re-read the novel in order to follow the process of the narration. For example, Allende carefully withholds the identity of the primary story teller until the end of the novel, but upon re-reading, one finds clues of who she is. A careless reader might disregard the complexity of the novel and merely toss it aside as being too difficult. Perhaps the challenging structure of the novel, along with the difference in setting and protagonist from Allende's other novels, makes it too frustrating to be enjoyable to an avid reader of Allende. However, serious Allende scholars should examine the novel again, particularly in light of its experimental nature.
The Infinite Plan also evidences Allende's growth as a feminist, or at least as a writer concerned about women. She holds true to her intention of breaking the norms of patriarchal language. All of the narrative presences support her feminist theme; these presences include a female omniscient narrator, the feminist reality of the twentieth century, the para text, and Reeves' confessions to his psychiatrist and narrator. The female omniscient narrator controls the novel and undermines the traditional power of a male protagonist and male narrator. Both the narrative presences and the female omniscient narrator guide Reeves on his journey of recovery. Ultimately, Reeves recovers because he discards his sexist behavior, understands the inherent perversion of male sexuality, and learns to value life from a female's perspective. The success of Allende's complicated narration, particularly as it presents its feminist theme, forgives the problems of the readability of the text.
