This Mad Instead

Saltzman (English, Missouri Southern State College) explores the use of metaphor in representative novels by writers such as Kathy Acker, Don DeLillo, William Gass, John Updike, and Paul West. He argues that even as these authors reveal metaphor as unreliable, they use it to structure modes of moral inquiry. The resolution of moral and aesthetic gratification, he argues, is one of the major purposes of metaphor in contemporary American fiction.