Listen to the Sound of the Quiet American: John Williams's Stoner

Abstract

Stoner (1965), John Williams’s third novel, questions and complicates mythologised versions of modern American identity and way of life. The story moves through two World Wars, the Great Depression following the Wall Street crash, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New-Deal America, a prolonged time of social upheaval throughout the world. The book re-imagines stuff-of-dreams versions of the American cultural hero modelled on the image of the brash, risk-taking and economically-successful individual of the 1920s decade. The position mediated by the narrative is one of disillusionment with a nation more in step with passionate, impulsive actions associated with cultural heroism than with cool, astute consideration of possible destructive consequences. Confronted and brought into question is the presumption of silence as ineffectual resistance to the injustices that operate within public and private institutionalized power structures. At first glance, Williams’s eponymous hero, William Stoner’s, wont to quietly internalize, rather than loudly agitate against, conflict-driven social environments, appears to reaffirm this view. Portrayed as a decent man who thinks before he speaks, Stoner’s character proffers the idea that silence and care-full thought before acting can be constructive in the pursuit of a better, more balanced way of being in the world. This essay argues that Stoner’s habitual interiority functions as a political symbolic filter to challenge commonly-held impressions of heroism understood as a garrulous, action-based cultural code of behavior in the practice of everyday life.