The End of History in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections

Abstract

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections can be many things to many readers—a domestic fiction, a campus novel, a neuronovel, a novel about mental illness, and a novel of globalization. A rereading of the novel over two decades after its publication in 2001 reveals yet another way to describe it—a historical novel that engages with the cultural and political discourse of the 1990s. The Corrections can be seen as engaging especially with the then popular thesis as conceived by Francis Fukuyama, which is that history has come to an endpoint because American-style democracy—a combination of capitalism and liberalism—has proved itself to be the best form of social and political organization, thereby ending all ideological struggle. In the novel, ideological struggles are hardly resolved, and history is far from being at its end. There are mainly two ways in which Franzen illustrates this: firstly, by showing the limits of economic and political liberalism; and secondly, by depicting the plights of the post-Soviet Union Lithuania. This also enables Franzen to critique the idea of the American Century that entails a sense of superiority and exceptionalism.