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of a once-important Dorset family, long in decline. This exercise in polishing up his persona was futile: partly because, despite his efforts to erase them, sufficient of the external facts about his father, his family and his life have survived for us to be able to see just what a sad, self-centred caricature the biography presented; and partly because he had left such a luminous record of his true inner life in the novels and poems. To devote so much time to such a pretence was hardly the sign of a man at ease with himself and the world; or of a man who had ever really come to terms with all those disintegrated components of his personality he had projected into his novels. Ultimately there was no apter epitaph on Hardy's life than the gruesome fate of the great man's mortal remains when he died in 1928. His cremated body was interred amid empty pomp in Westminster Abbey, just as his life out in the great world had long since turned to ashes. His heart was returned to be buried in Dorset where he had grown up: to the place his heart and his soul, his unrealised inner feminine, had never really left.

The way in which the gradual disintegration of Thomas Hardy's inner world was reflected in his novels gives us a particularly vivid picture of a process which was more generally taking place all over the Western world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Europe and America were carried by the advance of science and technology ever faster towards the modern world, as hundreds of millions moved from the countryside into the newly industrialised cities, as ancient ways of life vanished, as social hierarchies began to break down, as old forms of religion and morality began to dissolve, people were losing touch on an unprecedented scale with that framework which had given them so much of their sense of outward and inward identity. In psychological terms, they were losing contact with much of that which had helped root human existence in the Self. What we see reflected in stories is a perfect model of what then happens, as the ego comes increasingly to the fore.

In the next two chapters we shall look at two of the most revealing ways in which the storytelling of the past hundred years has reflected this split between Self and ego. The first of these, as we shall see in the works of such twentiethcentury storytellers as Chekhov and Proust, Pirandello and Samuel Beckett, is how, once the split has taken place, the ego eventually comes to a point where it has no sense of belonging to anything greater than itself. We see how it is in fact the framework of the Self which ultimately gives human life its sense of structure, meaning and purpose; and how, once contact with that is lost, the isolated ego is at last left facing nothing but a dark and empty void.

`All these clever people are so stupid, I have no one to talk to. I am so lonely, always so lonely, no one belongs to me, and ... who I am, what I exist for, nobody knows. Charlotta, in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard

`One does not know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among the unsubstantial fragments of a dream ... a life hagridden by people who have no connection with one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory as a dream.'

Marcel Proust, The Captive, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu

`Where I am I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.' Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Samuel Beckett, end of Waiting for Godot

`Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further ... so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

Scott Fitzgerald, end of The Great Gatsby

In this chapter and the next we shall be looking at two of the most significant things which happened to the nature of stories in the twentieth century. Each of these in its own way expressed a natural consequence of that profound psychological