The Question of Wholeness in Daniel Martin

Abstract

In Daniel Martin, a semi-autobiographical novel, John Fowles draws a portrayal of thepowerlessness of a scriptwriter who wishes to make a significant change in his career, stop writing othersinto his scripts, instead to become a novelist and write himself into his own novel. Living in the UnitedStates in the late 1960s, Daniel feels detached from whatever and whoever he has had in his life to makehimself the Daniel Martin of the late 1940’s. His earlier change of direction in his career from aplaywright to a scriptwriter later brings Daniel to a point at which he feels disenchanted by what he hasbecome. He also feels that he has become torn apart between his past and his present—something whichpushes him to try to gather the bits and pieces of his life into a visible whole in a narrative. That is why hebegins his narrative with a scene from his childhood in the first chapter. Yet, in the latter chapters of hisnarrative he is seen to have difficulties in sticking to a fixed tense and a fixed voice. The recurringzigzags in the choice of tenses and of voices eventually result in Daniel’s failure to respond strongly tofragmentation. His powerlessness is, however, covered up as well as made up for in the final chapters ofthe novel by someone else —the ill-concealed ghost of John Fowles’s third-person narrator. It is onlythrough the interventions of this ghost in Daniel’s narrative that his search for a more stable way ofassembling his fragmented consciousness and of being later able to devote it to the writing of a coherentnovel becomes possible.