Epistolary Novel:The Night Mail as a Form

Abstract

The overlap of literature types is a distinguishing sign for the literary text and its richness; the literary text in general, and the narrative one in particular, may derive from another literary art some artistic qualities and overlap with them. The novel" The Night Mail "drives us to sense this correlation between the two arts of narration and epistolary, and to grasp the combination which enriched the text, which is the problematic committed to this study. The analysis of the narrative structure is the approach followed in this study, which consists of; a Preface, an Introduction, Three Cores, and a Conclusion. The first core is The Threshold of the Title, the second core is The Structure of the Narrated, and the third core is On the Characters. One of the most important findings of this study is: that the use of epistles in this novel is a way for a revelation which helped to reveal the souls’ hidden pent-ups of its characters and to bring them near to the reader.