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. 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.
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. 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. Roosevelt’s New-Deal America, a prolonged time of social upheaval throughout the world.
The story moves through two World Wars, the Great Depression following the Wall Street crash, and President Franklin D.
Stoner (1965), John Williams’s third novel, questions and complicates mythologised versions of modern American identity and way of life.
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