Contents -- Part I: DEFINITIONS -- 1 What Is Character? -- 2 Some Illustrative Versions of Melodrama: American Westerns -- Corneille's Le Cid -- Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic -- The Conjugal Bed -- and America America -- Part II: A CRUX AND A CLASSIC -- 3 Hamlet as Action -- 4 Jane Austen's Minuet: Pride and Prejudice -- Part III: CHARACTERIZATION IN SYMBOLIC JOURNEYS -- 5 To the Last Outpost of Evil: Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" -- 6 Quest for the Antagonist: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick -- 7 The Idle Inquiry: Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" -- 8 Freedom Afloat - and Adrift: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- 9 A Sargasso of the Sinister: Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools -- Part IV: THE GREAT TRANSITION -- 10 Character and Coincidence: Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native -- 11 The Illusion of Action in Henry James -- The Problem in Capsule: "The Real Thing" and "The Beast in the Jungle," -- Discourse on Feminism: The Bostonians -- Launching the American Girl: The Portrait of a Lady -- Convolutions in the Major Phase: The Golden Bowl -- Action and the Illusion of Action: The Ambassadors -- 12 Aristocracy as Gesture -- The Heroic Posture -- Eternal Fire in the American South: Calder Willingham's Eternal Fire -- The Real Thing in the Wrong World: Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred -- Part V: MODERN CONSEQUENCES -- 13 The Idea Men -- Mud Huts of Intellect: Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt -- Action as Spoof: Peter De Vries's The Tents of Wickedness -- Idea Marching on One Leg: William Styron's The Long March -- Steinbeck's Economic Men: In Dubious Battle -- The Testing of Axel Heyst's Philosophy: Joseph Conrad's Victory -- Actions Well Inspired by Ideas: James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.

In and Out of College with Mary McCarthy: The Groves of Academe and The Group -- Other Novels, Other Ideas: Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men -- 14 The Diminished Self -- Hemingway's Naked Eyeballs: "The Killers," "Big Two-Hearted River," and The Sun Also Rises -- John O'Hara's Notion of How It Was: From the Terrace -- Anatomy of Alienation: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- The Centripetal Action: John Updike's The Centaur and Rabbit, Run and Wright Morris's One Day -- A Pattern of Un-Pattern: Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time -- Coda: Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies -- Signs of New Trends: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Philip Roth's Letting Go, and Saul Bellow's Herzog -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.