Blend of History and Fiction in Doctorow’s The Waterworks

Abstract

Edgar Laurence Doctorow’s novel The Waterworks has revisited and reinterpreted the issue of the complicity of facts and fiction in making of history. It has been contended and exhibited that no historical discourse or document can remain untarnished by the personal biases, fictional element and power politics. Similarly, no work of fiction cans remain a mere flight of imagination either. A considerable chunk of fact gets in to the fictional and the vice versa. A case in point, the novel refers to the real life New England celebrities in literature like William Dean Howells and James Russell Lowell and the like, commenting upon their long name s in comparison to their meager literary output. But at the same time, it centers on a journalist Martin Pemberton, the missing of his father who was experimented upon by an expert but insane doctor Sartorius, etc are purely fictional ones. Also, the reference to the Civil War, the growth of the City of New York, the corruption rampant on the tank and file of the security and police etc render the novel into a realistic and revisionist document which calls in question some of the established versions of American history. In fact, as this thesis conclude with internal evidence from the novel, the blending of fact and fiction, the personal and the public, is inevitable in world today which is increasingly getting narrower and narrower with the development of science and technology, especially in the domain of journalism