The Activist and New Narrative

The writing style emphasized by the New Narrative movement and evident in Renee Gladman’s novel “The Activist” serves as an unorthodox method of informing the reader of the storyline. Instead of using text to describe the setting, the audience is only allowed to view dialogue and the thoughts of the protagonist. This serves to not only distort the typical manner of reading, but also make the work seem like a detective novel with the author only sharing parts of the plot to keep them guessing. I found the style to be interesting, but also rather limited due to the vague or nonexistent description of scenes or locations of the main character.