My starting point is the unalarming but often ignored premise that there is an important difference between studying a writer's philosophy as a system of ideas and examining a specific novel by him as a philosophical novel— that is, as a work in which an ideology explicitly expressed by the author within the novel serves as a means of explicating and evaluating the novel. This issue in the interpretation of fiction is especially pertinent to the criticism of the naturalistic novel, since naturalistic fiction— as in much of the work of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser— often contains quasiphilosophical discourse that is both blatantly intrusive and puerile in content. To properly criticize this kind of naturalistic fiction it is necessary, I would suggest, to recognize that ideas in fiction are not always what they seem to be.

The first point I would like to make about philosophical ideas in fiction is that they can serve as metaphors as well as discursive statements. Ideas of this kind are a special form of “objective correlative”— special because we usually associate that term with the concrete image. Their principal role in a novel is not to articulate a particular philosophy at a particular moment but rather to contribute to an emotional reality in the work as a whole. We have come to realize that ideas have played such metaphoric roles in other literary forms in earlier literary periods. We are no longer likely to discuss Alexander Pope primarily as a spokesman for specific eighteenth- century philosophical or literary beliefs, though these beliefs are expressed by Pope in his poems. Rather, we now recognize that Pope's beliefs represent metaphoric equivalents of certain perennial states of mind and that it is these equivalents that constitute the permanent poetic thrust of his work.

We have not, however, recognized that ideas in the modern philosophical novel can be interpreted as we have interpreted ideas in earlier and different literary forms. Indeed, the fact that there is a subgenre of modern fiction called “the novel of ideas” implies that ideas in fiction are a special literary phenomenon and that philosophical fiction is thus a special class of fiction. There are several reasons for this failure to recognize the similarity between the role of ideas in fiction and in other literary forms.