#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
Macbeth is not being seen by God so much as he is being seen by us, the audience. His prayers, you might say, are soliloquies, and get very close to mental thought, as he agonises before us over the dilemma he finds himself in. One reason for the play’s power has to do with its domestic intimacy, whereby we feel we are eavesdropping on the horrid privacy of the Macbeths’ marriage, not to mention the guilt-tainted outpourings of their monologues. At certain moments, the play seems to want to pull away and develop itself into a new form, the form of the novel… I think Shakespeare is essentially being a novelist at such moments.

David’s story is almost entirely public; Macbeth’s is one of publicised privacy. And this private man differs from David in being the possessor of a memory.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 84
摘于07/04/2026