Conclusion

Summary

Each of the preceding chapters has been devoted to a different novel's representation of community; I would like to conclude by exploring some of the differences and similarities between them. Do they share a common sense of community, or do they have nothing in common? Is the sense of community merely a matter of common sense, in both senses, or is it a problematic, fragile and conflictual construct?

Nancy defines community in general as resistance: ‘The community resists: in a sense, as I have said, it is resistance itself’ (IC, p. 58). By this he means specifically resistance to the immanence of common being; and by no means all the novels studied here understand community or resistance in this way. But resistance in its broader conventional meaning does seem to form the most obvious starting point for the search for a common sense of community, in that all of the communities represented in these novels are shown to be struggling against something. What that is, however, varies greatly – and, to the extent that they are shaped by the forces that they are opposing, produces very different types of community.

One might have expected, for instance, that the most widespread form of struggle would be that against poverty. But while it is true that poverty is an almost universal condition of the lives depicted in these novels, it never forms the explicit central theme of the novel; it is more usually seen as the consequence of some other lack or some other hostile force, which needs to be overcome before the material standard of living can be improved.