Furtive Role-Playing and Vulnerability in "Wakefield:" Nathanial Hawthorne and E. L. Doctorow

Abstract

In most of his novels Doctorow confirmed, "that the past is very much alive, but that it's not easily accessed," writes Jay Parini. "We tell and retell stories, and these stories illuminate our daily lives. He showed us again and again that our past is our present" (2015). Indeed, when Doctorow rewrote "Wakefield" in 2008, he proposed to fill in gaps unbridged by Hawthorne's "Wakefield" (1835).Doctorow gives his first-person narrator and protagonist the power to tell the story free from the load of Hawthorne's first person witness narrator who keeps the protagonist under his direct and strict observation. Through his protagonist, however, Doctorow lets us learn the psychological reasons why Wakefield decides to leave his home. Besides, Doctorow presents the events that happened to Wakefield during his absence in a more probable manner by creating a plot, with causative connections between the events. In so doing, Doctorow seeks to reconnect the past with the present in order to illuminate our present.