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In an interview with Elizabeth P. Glixman, Jayne Pupek notes that “[t]he purpose of a novel is to tell a story that enhances or deepens the reader’s experience of being human.” It’s difficult to disagree with that. Ulysses goes deep into the experience of an everyman sort-of exile on an ordinary day. James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers, possibly the first ecological novel, takes its title from its human characters and, while the natural world certainly seems like a character at times in Thoreau‘s Walden, it is primarily a catalyst or canvas for his own actions and subjectivities. Even novels told from non-human perspectives typically include human figures: Paul Auster‘s Timbuktu, for instance, leans so far towards telling the humans’ stories that it seems to end unbalanced. Even a novel that included no people might be said to deepen one’s understanding of being human by contrast.

But what does it mean to deepen the experience of being human? My experience is my experience and, being human last I checked, all of my experience is human. Even the act of not paying attention is a form of human experience; even experience I don’t realize is happening is human experience. By what standard can one sort of experience be called deeper than another?

I think the key is that the novel deepens our understanding of that experience. It provides us with an outside point of reference for comparison, contrast, and consideration of what we do and how we live.

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