Main Characteristics Of Wallace Stegner's Novella "Remembering Laughter"

Some people would consider the novella to be the perfect form of prose fiction. Novellas are interesting books to read because in a short amount of pages, the author is able to tell an intimate story with different elements. This is the case in both William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow and Wallace Stegner’s Remembering Laughter. In both novellas, the authors use similar literary elements but the theme of the stories as a whole are completely different. This is an interesting way to tell a story because the reader gets the chance to relate the the similar elements to each novella.

This way, the reader is able to determine the circumstances that differentiate the themes present in both novellas. This is sometimes the case in the real world as well. In both novellas as well as in life, we can compare how sometimes similar elements can develop into becoming different themes.

Silence plays an important role in the developing of the storyline in each novella, and both authors use it as a tool to achieve different thematic meanings.

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In So Long, See You Tomorrow, a single moment impacts our narrator with an internal conflict he lives with for the rest of his life. “The meeting in the corridor ... I keep reliving in my mind, as if I were going through a series of reincarnations that end up each time in the same failure.” (51) From this moment, the entirety of the novel is built upon this single action, or lack thereof.

Cletus really just doesn't know what to do, so he decides to keep silent. As he grows older, he becomes more and more regretful he never made an effort to speak up, and this causes him down a path of pretty much conducting his own investigation of the murder of Clarence Smith; filling in the blanks with his imagination along the way. Because of the narrators serious internal conflict, he spends the rest of his life living with regret over a situation he really had no control over.

In Remembering Laughter, Stegner uses silence as a tool to develop the different major relationships in the Novella, especially Malcolm’s relationship with his elders, and Margret’s relationship with Alec and Elspeth. After Elspeth provokes Alec into an affair, Margret really refuses to talk to either one of them anymore - essentially building a wall between the relationship between both her sister and her husband. When Malcolm is born, he's a product of the environment he’s grown up in. He only knows his family as being formal and bitter, and this drives him to leave them once he finds out that Alec and Elspeth are his actual parents. I think in life as well as both novellas, we’ve all been given the chance at some point to speak out about something, and wether or not we choose to do so is a decision that would be made differently by those who encounter this situation.

Both authors use death as a tool to progress the storyline in each novella and achieve different thematic meanings in each death. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator’s family is forced into emotional solitude when their father shuts down as an emotional reaction to his wife’s death. James F. Mayfield who wrote an academic journal on So Long See You Tomorrow says that “Although the narrators tone in So Long See You Tomorrow is prevailingly temperate and ruminative, a strong current of feeling is nevertheless just below the seemingly placid surface of Maxwell's prose. Resentment is directer principally words toward his father.” (25) After the father meets someone new, he moves his family to the edge of town and it’s here where our narrator meets Cletus, jumping into the the plot of the storyline. The death of Lloyd Wilson has a thematic meaning was well. In life, you cant always tell whois struggling with what in their lives, and we tend to think of ourselves as the main character, and we see everyone else as secondary characters. The narrator could never have know that Cletus’s mother was cheating on his father with His best friend and neighbor Lloyd. In Remembering Laughter, after Alec’s death Margret and Elspeth can go back to being sisters again. From Malcolm’s perspective, when Alec dies, Malcolm decides he needs to leave. He had been living a lie his entire life, and sheltered from his true identity. Alec death gives Malcolm the opportunity to leave and figure out how to be his own person and to find out who he really is.

Both of the main young male characters in the novellas have troubled pasts, and the authors use different mediums to comfort them in their adolescent years that help progress the storyline. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, The narrator finds solace after his mother dies and his dad remarries in playing in the scaffolding of his not yet finished home, and it is here where he meets Cletus. The rudimentary doorways and open walls create an easy access which is almost magical and there is a sympathy in the joining of the two troubled boys. Christopher Stewart’s academic journal says that “that the narrator conflates his failures as a son with his failing Cletus Smith. The narrator tells us that as an adult he had moved to New York City and eventually sought the help of a psychoanalyst, who after six months of therapy, brought him once again to those nights when he paced the floor with his father…Immediately he left and walked out into the streets, New York being a place “where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy” (131). Thus, his memoir of Cletus Smith and his invention of the Smith family’s past are framed by the story of his inability to cope with the death of his mother in a fashion acceptable to his father.” In Remembering Laughter Malcolm is the product of Margret having an affair with her sisters husband the complicated love triangle results in Malcolm growing up with the stress of his families hidden secret, as well as believing he doesn't have a father and the rest of his family treating him coldly. This causes Malcolm to take comfort in Alec when no one else is around. In Malcolm's eyes Alec is the closest thing to a father figure he has. Both characters troubled adolescent years cause them to find happiness outside of their normal boundaries.

Characters in each Novella make decisions that severely impact their lives for years to come. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator chooses not to speak to Cletus in the hallway causing him regret it so much, it drives him to be obsessed with the murder case Cletus’s dad gets involved in. “The meeting in the corridor ... I keep reliving in my mind, as if I were going through a series of reincarnations that end up each time in the same failure.” (51) In Remembering Laughter, Elspeth makes the decision to sleep with Alec, causing a rift between the three of them for years to come.