Montaigne/Austen Essay

     "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant," wrote David Foster Wallace in "Good Old Neon." This has been a notion supported by Montaigne's techniques and topics in his essays in which a window is provided into his thinking through a stream of consciousness style of writing. This loosely structured style greatly contrasts with Jane Austen's in Pride and Prejudice since she is extremely meticulous in what she writes. Montaigne's style is as personal to him as each author's is unique.

     Montaigne supports David Foster Wallace's statement in several ways hitting the major points. What's going on is too fast. This is reflected by the way Montaigne writes as he thinks and doesn't have the time to plan out everything he will put onto paper. The vast amount of thoughts that go on inside are so huge and interconnected that Montaigne leaves a different topic to be discussed in over one hundred "essays." Many of these essays contain the same names, such as Caesar, but are talked about in entirely different ways, such as waging war or his comparison to Alexander the Great. The reader only sees a small portion of what he really thought about these topics since he couldn't write about them every time they came to mind and when he did sit and write, his mind took him elsewhere. From these moments that he did write, a window is being open in which we can look through to see and experience his process of writing firsthand. The stream of consciousness technique welcomes the reader to what's being created.

     Austen's early nineteenth century fiction against Montaigne's late sixteenth century nonfiction provide us with a deeply contrasting pair of literary styles. Austen has a story set up with all of the elements of a plot- exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. He has tens of short topics which he usually strays from and ends up talking about something completely different, as in "On the resemblance of children to their fathers," where he is obsessed with doctors and medicine. This is very different than Austen's precise word placement and careful consideration of what will go next in her novel.  His run on sentences are a common trademark of stream of consciousness, especially the description of Alexander the Great in "On the most excellent of men." Austen's syntax and diction are always proper English. Her use of dialogue to move the story along from Elizabeth and Darcy, are very different than Montaigne adding Latin phrases or anecdotes and short stories to add depth to his own opinions. His style has no true consistency and one chapter could have several stories such as "The three good wives," or one in "On a monster-child." Montaigne likes to add history in his essays and makes a number of allusions. Several people and nations are reoccurring, including Caesar, Seneca, philosophers, Romans, and the Greeks. Whereas Pride and Prejudice takes place in a setting that only goes as far back as the first page of the novel with no other outside information than city names. 

     Montaigne wrote his essays in a way to provide a window into his train of thought. There, a reader can see how much information cannot possibly be written onto paper. With so much interconnecting information going on inside a man's head, Montaigne's style reflected the lack of organization of his own thoughts. Jane Austen's style was quite different in the fact that she wrote a story and was entirely focused on the perfection of this piece. Her mind did not have, and was not allowed, distractions from her work. Each of them possessed opposing styles for contrasting writing purposes.