Dylan Thomas knew the part his poetry played in his “individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” While this baring “of the real causes and forces of the creative brain and body” generated exciting imagery and rhetorical experiments sometimes baffling to readers, Thomas also insisted on communication to others engaged in the same struggle through “a progressive line, or theme, of movement in every poem”—what he called “narrative.” He said, “I believe in the simple thread of action through a poem, but that is an intellectual thing aimed at lucidity through narrative.” Though we may find his concept of narrative unusually broad, Thomas conceived of it as the life—a main moving column—that “must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.” This view of poetic creation as his personal dialectic of images complements Thomas' principal theme: the paradox of life creating and consuming itself.

The James Osborn Collection of Joyce Cary manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library contains all of the extant notebooks, worksheets, trial scenes, and early versions of Cary's works, both published and unpublished, finished and unfinished. This collection, gathering together in one place all of Cary's manuscripts, provides a unique record of the techniques, intentions, and development of an important contemporary novelist. Though the genesis and development of each of Cary's novels can be traced from an examination of the manuscript collection, I have limited this study to the first trilogy because the complexity of the trilogy form provides a deeper insight into Cary's method of writing and because the trilogy form represents his most important literary achievement.

The Protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's short novel El acoso is an informer fleeing from men who would avenge the deaths he has caused. The pursuit and punishment of an informer, not a new plot, is usually developed with rapid pacing and suspense. But Carpentier modifies this traditional story of the chase by breaking it into a mosaic of fragmentary incidents and remembrances arranged without chronological sequence. Adopting certain techniques of the stream-of-consciousness writers, he reduces external action to a minimum and uses interior monologues and confused shreds of memory to show the inner life of his characters. Yet his work is not primarily a psychological study: the combination of two apparently disparate approaches to the novel (one a story line based on a closelyknit, causal-temporal progression and the other a narrative structure determined in part by the flux and shift of consciousness) creates a static and almost allegorical depiction of Betrayal in its various modes and incarnations. This duality of presentation is also evident in the subject matter: definite historical happenings, tied to actual sites in the city of Havana, are the factual ingredients in a drama that seems to be just one possible version of a constant theme. Uniting the particular and the abstract, intertwining the external chain of events (shattered and rearranged according to noncausal principles) with pictures of internal chaos, Carpentier presents both the vision of a traitorous, degenerate world in which man plays out certain prescribed roles and the artistic or literary organization of this drama of the fall. Underlying these elements and binding them together is one of Carpentier's repeated themes—the representation, domination, or denial of time.