Truth in Fictional Text: Howards End

This paper investigates the evolution taking place in the rhetoric strategies through which truth is articulated in Howards End. Forster's narrators do not seem to attain absolute authority because they are so playful and incisive that even their serious comments can lead to an ironic reading and a provisional truth. Thus this paper suggests that the element of self-referentiality plays an important part in Forster's narratives. The utterance of each character in this novel has Forster's representations of dialogue, an aspect of novelistic skill for which he is particularly well known, maintains a consistency of idiom and tone which conveys the impression of realistic characters. The characters by deploying the dialogue, reported speech and free indirect style, running through the narratorial discourse deliver a joy of subtlety in the novel. Bearing this in mind, this paper look into explicit expressions of values presented as truths, and demonstrates how Forster, without harming his complex narratives, proposes certain ideas.