By Peter Biles
Indeed, perhaps no character in modern storytelling stands at more of a crossroads than the male protagonist. We could talk about how 鈥渨okeness鈥 infiltrated books and culture over the last couple of decades, dethroned the male protagonist, and booted him to the curb. More specifically, though, we could mention how one of the major ways that fiction in particular has changed involves the shift from a more external narrative style to intense interiority. The trend hearkens back to modernism, when writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf published odysseys of the psyche instead of physical adventures on the open sea. This is, of course, a generalization; Dante鈥檚 The Divine Comedy is written in the first person, and Augustine鈥檚 Confessions was one of the first truly introspective works in the modern sense of the term. In short, though, contemporary literature gave rise to internal and personal narrative, sometimes without even an overarching plot. That begs a question: Whose personal experiences and interiority matters, and whose doesn鈥檛?