The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and c… - John Barth

[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnections between apparently disparate phenomena, as part of our ongoing project of making sense of the world. Somewhat different, and more rigorous, is the novelist's So what? … [T]he best artists have a keenly intelligent feel, however intuitive, for just [such] demonstrable interconnections […], and for the relevance of those interconnections not only to their own artistic practice but to the circumstance of being humanly alive and vigorously sentient in a particular historical time and place.

The ascendancy of the novel is historically associated with the ascendancy of the middle class and the spread of general literacy, and those in turn, in the West at least, with the development of the institutions of liberal democracy and the civil state. […] No doubt I am being both biased and superstitious, but because of that historical connection I think of the novel (and, by extension, of general literacy) as a canary in the coal mines of democratic civil society. […] If this particular canary really does go belly-up, I'm old-fashioned enough to fear for the general civic air.

[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life ("that massive datum," John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here not of fabrications but of sincere, straightforward factual accounts. Another way to put it is that any life's story can be told in any number of ways, depending on the teller's "handle," or angle of view, or lens. In fact, of course, the same applies to fictional characters: people made out of words in a novel or words and images on a screen.