Gerald's Party
Encyclopedia
Gerald’s Party is the fourth full-length novel written by Robert Coover
, published in 1986. The book encompasses a single night at a party given by the title character and narrator, Gerald. Though the murder of a beautiful actress is central to the plot, Coover's text has little in common with a traditional murder mystery. He appears to be approaching the murder mystery genre with the goal of subverting/exhausting its possibilities. A comparable strategy can be seen in his retellings of fairy tales (see Briar Rose, Pricksongs), and his reframing of movie conventions (Ghost Town, A Night at the Movies). Like Coover's other later works, this is experimental fiction. The text regularly returns to themes of sex, violence, and a blurred boundary between theatre and reality.
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Robert Coover
Robert Lowell Coover is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.-Life and works:...
, published in 1986. The book encompasses a single night at a party given by the title character and narrator, Gerald. Though the murder of a beautiful actress is central to the plot, Coover's text has little in common with a traditional murder mystery. He appears to be approaching the murder mystery genre with the goal of subverting/exhausting its possibilities. A comparable strategy can be seen in his retellings of fairy tales (see Briar Rose, Pricksongs), and his reframing of movie conventions (Ghost Town, A Night at the Movies). Like Coover's other later works, this is experimental fiction. The text regularly returns to themes of sex, violence, and a blurred boundary between theatre and reality.
Plot introduction
As Gerald tries to describe the things around him in painstaking detail, he recounts simultaneous conversations and events as they happen by using a format similar to data packet handling. After describing a small part of a situation or a conversation, he moves on to a small part of a different conversation, then returns to the first conversation, or maybe moves on to a third or a fourth, returning each time to try to be as accurate as possible while recording the events.Major themes
The tone of the novel is humorous, and there are many puns, double-entendres, jokes, sight-gags, and deliberate ironies. There are also graphic depictions of various bodily functions, including different types of sexual intercourse. Gerald, speaking in what could be described as stream-of-consciousness, often appears nonplussed or unaffected by the decadent and orgiastic events that surround him, and, in addition, he comes across as an unreliable narratorUnreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
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