Pictures from an Institution (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Randall Jarrell
- First Published: 1954
- Type of Plot: Satire
- Time of Work: The 1950’s
- Setting: Benton College, a fictional school somewhere in the Northeastern United States
- Principal Characters: The unnamed narrator, The narrator’s wife, Dwight Robbins, Pamela Robbins, Gertrude Johnson, Sidney Bacon, Flo Whittaker, Jerrold Whittaker, Gottfried Rosenbaum, Irene Rosenbaum, Constance Morgan
- Genres: Long fiction, Satire
- Subjects: Education or educators, Colleges or universities, Higher education, Students or student life, Comedy
- Locales: Northeast (U.S.)
The Novel
Pictures from an Institution is divided into seven chapters, each of which is, in turn, divided into several numbered scenes. Randall Jarrell was enormously knowledgeable about music, and the novel has been likened to a musical composition in which the chapters are like movements and the scenes like themes, recurring point and counterpoint. The narrative begins at the end of a spring term at Benton, an exclusive college for women located somewhere within an easy distance of Harvard and Princeton Universities. The unnamed narrator eventually reveals himself as a...
[The entire page is 2262 words long]
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