The Character Series

Abstract

The story of twentieth-century history is often told as a story of generations: Boomer, Gen X, millennial, and so on. The story of generations, however, is also a story of serial temporality: one generation succeeds the other, according to the rhythms of heterosexual reproduction. This chapter looks at the work of two writers who explored the serial temporality of generations by writing multi-decade character-based novel series: John Updike and Doris Lessing. Updike’s Rabbit novels and Lessing’s Children of Violence series turn to type characters and self-reflexive commentary to explore the tension in generational temporality between change and continuity, and development and repetition.