The Text that Self-Destructs: Narrative Complexity in William Trevor's Fools of Fortune

Abstract

Something happened to William Trevor's novelistic fiction between 1976 and 1980. Rather like Richard Rogers's and Renzo Piano's revolutionary Centre Pompidou in Paris (inaugurated in 1977), the plumbing and wiring of previously internal functions were for the first time exhibited on the outside of the structure. In The Children ofDynmouth (1976), like all his previous novels, Trevor used straightforward sequencing of (always numbered) episodes to organise and relay his narration to the reader. In Other People's Worlds (1980) a formal inventory of en-titled sections is introduced in a table of contents. This overall architecture is imposed externally to reflect the attempted structural and thematic unity of authorial design internally.