摘要：Stoner (1965), John Williams’s third novel, questions and complicates
mythologised versions of modern American identity and way of life. The
story moves through two World Wars, the Great Depression following
the Wall Street crash, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New-Deal
America, a prolonged time of social upheaval throughout the world. The
book re-imagines stuff-of-dreams versions of the American cultural hero
modelled on the image of the brash, risk-taking and economically-successful
individual of the 1920s decade. The position mediated by the narrative is
one of disillusionment with a nation more in step with passionate, impulsive
actions associated with cultural heroism than with cool, astute consideration
of possible destructive consequences. Confronted and brought into
question is the presumption of silence as ineffectual resistance to the
injustices that operate within public and private institutionalized power
structures. At first glance, Williams’s eponymous hero, William Stoner’s,
wont to quietly internalize, rather than loudly agitate against, conflictdriven
social environments, appears to reaffirm this view. Portrayed as a
decent man who thinks before he speaks, Stoner’s character proffers the
idea that silence and care-full thought before acting can be constructive
in the pursuit of a better, more balanced way of being in the world. This
essay argues that Stoner’s habitual interiority functions as a political
symbolic filter to challenge commonly-held impressions of heroism
understood as a garrulous, action-based cultural code of behavior in the
practice of everyday life.
