Text Analysis on Henry Green

Essay 2500-3000 words

Class in Henry Green's Party Going, a novel on pre revolutionary social classes Nearly all authors would like their books read by as many readers as possible. They will want to inspire readers, leaving the book open to all kind of interpretations, the reader will see the clues to use to understand his version of the plot. When the story is simple and the ideas of the author clear it leaves less room for the readers imagination to work. By consequence it won't be accessible to as many readers, for the readers that don't like the ideas of the novel will not be able to imagine a different version that they prefer. In contrast, in real literature, also called art, the writers writer will fill his text with symbols and experimental writing so that the room for interpretation is so big that anybody can have their own theory on the novel. This is the case for Henry Green's Party Going. In this novel nothing really happens, in brief, on a friday night a group of very rich londoners try to get a train boat to France but because of the fog they are trapped in the station with a mass of people waiting for the trains to move. Nearly the whole novel is spent with this party in the station's hotel waiting. At the end of the novel there is no conclusion of any kind either. All is left open for the readers interpretation. For me as a reader, I found the allusions to social classes, especially upper and lower class very frequent in the text. The author's experiment of putting a rich group of people in the middle of a mass of working class, is so interesting from a sociological point a view that even if the mass of people is only in the background, it can't possibly be put aside. In the following analysis, I will interpret the novel as a work on social classes. Starting with the narrative style, I will show how the narrator often uses his personal experiences to make the characters as realistic as possibles. Just by dialogue