Hawthorne's

Abstract

Based on the critical assumption that writers of short fiction, like other artists, progressively refine and develop the conventions of their genre, the following study compares two of Hawthorne's experiments in first-person narration with similar experiments of two twentieth-century fiction writers, Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth. The narrative commentary of Hawthorne's "Wakefield" and "The Seven Vagabonds" develops the theme of an artist's struggle to realize his own identity in his art; narrative commentary develops the same theme in Nabokov's "The Leonardo" and Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse." The similarities suggest that Hawthorne, early in his career and early in the development of the short story as a genre, experimented with narrative techniques and themes that remain of interest in the genre today.