Examples of Successful Rule-Breaking in Novels [closed]
Closed by System on Jul 26, 2014 at 01:56
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I just finished "The House of the Seven Gables" by Hawthorne. I was struck by how often he switched tenses. Mostly the narration was in past tense, but then he would switch to present or even future tense. Sometimes the tense would change for a sentence or a paragraph; other times it would change for a whole chapter. It was a bit jarring, since it's hardly ever done, to the point where it is almost an iron-clad rule. (As in: Any competent editor or English teacher will always mark it wrong.) But it worked well the way Hawthorne did it in this novel. This set me thinking (and here's the question):
What are some (other) great examples where authors of novels successfully break the "rules" for writing? (And of course, what was the broken rule?)
I don't mean rule-breaking once in a blue moon, for dramatic emphasis. I mean a lot -- multiple chapters, or the whole book. And I'm restricting this to novels, because short stories are much more experimental. And by "successfully," I mean that the novel sold well and is fairly well-known. Also, I'm not necessarily asking for a list of ground-breaking novels, which broke "rules" that once seemed important but no longer stand.
Another example would be "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Vonnegut. (For a variety of reasons!)
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I could suggest the Water! trilogy by Gael Baudino, but it's not well-known and I found the experimental format exhausting. Still, Your Mileage May Vary.
In the three books (O Greenest Branch, The Dove Looked In, Branch and Crown) she kept switching not merely narrator and POV, but the entire narrative style: parts were standard narration, then parts were being told by a marketing guy as he was getting mugged, then parts were a stone-cutting manual which was increasingly crossed out and being used as a religious text.... I guess in the end the story was told, but it was kind of painful after a while. And I really loved Baudino's other works (The Elven series, Gossamer Axe), so this was a letdown for me.
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