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Someone in professor Dalke's thurday section (I'm sorry, Ive forgotten who) brought up All the King's Men as another novel with a similar quest for understanding the past. I read All the King's Men last year, and had been comparing it to The Sorrows of An American as I read-- but another thing brought up in class was an important difference between the two. Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King's Men, has an epiphany at the end about how to live with the past that changes his attitude (an evolution of character) In The Sorrows of an American there is no such epiphany or large change at the end.

That made me wonder how the lack of an epiphany or resolution was relevant to our theme of evolution. On one hand (as Pr. Dlke pointed out) it seems to be different from evolution-- part of the point of evolution is that it creates something new. On the other hand, the development of a novel which has no resolution is fairly recent in the history of literature-- that is one of the ways in which the  form of the novel is a change from previous previous forms. This lack of a resolution, a definite ending, could also be related to biological evolution in that it is a process without a definite endpoint. Like this novel, it just keeps going in a collection of small changes. This made the novel very frustrating for me to read, but maybe it also makes the story more like real life than most fiction. 

--According to Sontag, art's role is not to imitate life but to be something new-- so is this more "realistic" style necessarily a good thing?