Rasselas: Fiction and Acceptance

Abstract

In this chapter I shall return, as in my last on Utopia, to wider questions of form than I was concerned with in the first, in particular to the relation between human aspiration and recalcitrant reality, in so far as that relation is represented within the fictional strategies of the book. Firstly, I want to discuss the structure of the whole. I have already emphasised the recurring pattern of broken expectation and also suggested that, despite the sequence of failures which seems to say only that happiness is nowhere, there is a development within the book which is registered in certain important changes in Rasselas — in short, he matures. When the book is looked at as a whole, these two observations will be seen to be closely associated.