My Reading Note
I first noticed the pattern while reading Les Misérables. Hugo set aside the story for fifty pages to describe the Paris sewers. I should have been frustrated but was fascinated instead. Why would a novelist intrude upon his own narrative with an essay? The question sent me back to Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” and Steinbeck’s interchapters. This essay examines what these intrusions do and why novelists write them.
A novelist who suspends the story to lecture on Parisian sewers, the nature of romance, or systemic injustice takes a risk because the reader may skip ahead or close the book. Yet Nathaniel Hawthorne, Victor Hugo, and John Steinbeck all took this risk. (Herman Melville took it as well, though his essayistic chapters in Moby Dick appear in a more compressed form.)
Why would a novelist depart from narrative momentum to deliver an essay? The essayistic chapter signals that the novel has ambitions beyond storytelling by shifting the reader’s attention from character and plot to argument and idea. This shift functions as a structural choice, and narrative discipline continues alongside it.
This article examines three novels containing dedicated, bounded sections that suspend the plot at strategic points to advance a thesis. What requires examination is the argument each section makes and the method by which it argues.
A Taxonomy of Essayistic Interruption
The essayistic chapter is a structural device that shifts the novel from storytelling to argumentation. The novelist suspends the plot to advance a thesis, and the reader who endures the suspension gains access to a mode of thought that pure narrative cannot provide. If a novel contained an essayistic chapter that advanced no thesis and contributed nothing to the reader’s understanding of the work, the claim would not hold.
Three structural patterns emerge from the selected novels.
| Pattern | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Single concentrated block | One essayistic section, usually at the opening or close | Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” |
| Distributed digressions | Essayistic sections scattered across the entire novel at irregular intervals | Hugo’s Waterloo, convents, and sewers |
| Systematic alternation | Regular, predictable alternation between narrative and essayistic chapters | Steinbeck’s sixteen interchapters |
Each pattern will be examined separately. The placement and frequency of these essayistic sections reveal something about the novel’s larger intentions.
In developing this taxonomy, I noticed that criticism of essayistic novels tends to treat all digressions as the same. Yet, a single block at the opening functions differently from distributed digressions or systematic alternation. The reader’s experience of each pattern is distinct, and the taxonomy respects that distinction.
Hawthorne and the Single Concentrated Block
The Section
“The Custom-House” runs approximately forty pages and precedes the narrative of Hester Prynne. It is an autobiographical sketch of Hawthorne’s time as a customs officer in Salem, structurally disconnected from the romance that follows. The narrator describes his daily routine, his political dismissal, and his discovery of a faded manuscript bearing the scarlet letter.
The Argument It Makes
The “Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850) advances an epistemology of romance. Truth is unknowable through factual record alone, but the imagination provides a legitimate path to meaning. Hawthorne writes of “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” The essay argues that fiction inhabits this liminal space, not bound by strict realism but not purely fantastical.
The narrator admits to embellishing the manuscript he claims to have found. He invents dialogue and fills in the gaps. The essay argues that this invention is the necessary work of the romancer, who transforms historical residue into moral truth. Deception has no place in this account.
The Reader’s Experience
The reader must endure forty pages of preface before reaching the narrative of Hester Prynne, which, in a way, acts as a filter. The reader who persists enters the romance with an understanding that the novel follows different rules than strict realism. The “Custom-House” provides the instruction manual.
The Structural Function
The single concentrated block at the opening establishes the novel’s terms before the story begins. No further essayistic sections follow. Once the reader completes the preface, the narrative continues without pause from the first chapter to the last. Hawthorne tests the reader once, at the start, and then rewards persistence with an uninterrupted story.
Among these novels that I’ve read, the “Custom-House” is the clearest case of the essayistic chapter as a “reader filter.” Hawthorne signals from the first page that this novel will not behave like ordinary fiction. The reader who skips the preface misses the instruction manual for the romance that follows.
Hugo and the Distributed Digression
The Sections
Hugo scatters extended essays throughout Les Misérables (1862). The Battle of Waterloo digression runs dozens of pages early in the novel, describing the battle in which no main character participates. The convents of Paris digression examines monastic life as a form of social withdrawal. The argot digression analyzes Parisian slang as a language of the oppressed. The sewers digression, near the novel’s end, describes the underground system as the conscience of the city.
The Argument They Make
The digressions argue that individual lives cannot be understood without the context of history, architecture, language, and infrastructure. Waterloo is not just a battle but a turning point in European democracy, creating the conditions for the July Revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie. The sewers are not simply tunnels; they are a system of waste that mirrors society’s treatment of its poor. Hugo writes that “the sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else.”
The argument is social and systemic. Poverty, ignorance, and darkness can be overcome, but only by understanding the structures that produce them. The digressions provide that understanding.
The Reader’s Experience
Unlike Melville’s clustered digressions, Hugo’s appear throughout the entire novel, including near the end. The reader never knows when the narrative will stop; the interruptions become part of the reading rhythm. This unpredictability can be exhausting, but it also trains the reader to expect argument as an ongoing component of the novel.
The Structural Function
Distributed digressions transform the novel into a hybrid form: part story, part treatise. Hugo does not ask the reader to endure one concentrated block or a single cluster. He asks the reader to accept that the novel is both narrative and essay and that the two modes are inseparable. Unlike Melville, who clusters his digressions in the first half, Hugo distributes his across the entire novel. The reader never reaches a point where the interruptions stop. The test is ongoing.
The Waterloo digression is the most contested passage in the novel because it devotes one hundred pages to a battle that none of the main characters attend. Yet, Hugo is not writing a novel about the characters alone but about the forces that form them. The digression is the thesis, and without it the student revolutionaries of the novel’s final act have no historical ground.
Steinbeck and Systematic Alternation
The Sections
Steinbeck’s sixteen interchapters (sometimes called intercalary chapters in critical discussions) appear at regular intervals throughout The Grapes of Wrath (1939), alternating with the narrative chapters focused on the Joad family. Each interchapter is short, averaging five pages. Each shifts from the specific story of the Joads to a general, essayistic mode.
The Argument They Make
The interchapters argue that the Great Depression was a systemic crisis, not a collection of individual problems. One interchapter describes a used car salesman exploiting desperate buyers. Another describes a tractor driver who has no hatred for the farmers he displaces because he is also a victim of the system. The famous turtle interchapter depicts a turtle crossing a highway, a metaphor for slow, persistent movement against obstacles.
The cumulative argument is collective. Steinbeck writes that the movement from “I” to “we” is the only response to systemic injustice. The interchapters develop this argument through accumulation, and no single interchapter carries the full argument alone. Together, they form a social thesis.
The Reader’s Experience
The alternation is predictable and regular. The reader learns to expect an interchapter after every narrative chapter, and this regularity reduces friction. The essayistic sections become part of the novel’s architecture rather than unexpected interruptions. The reader never endures a long block of essay because the argument arrives in short, digestible units.
The Structural Function
Systematic alternation integrates argument into narrative rhythm. Steinbeck trains the reader to move between story and essay without resistance. This pattern makes the argument more accessible while keeping its power intact. By the end of the novel, the reader has absorbed sixteen short essays without feeling the burden of a single long one.
I consider Steinbeck’s interchapters the most reader-friendly of the three patterns. Five pages of argument, then back to the Joads. The regularity is almost comforting, but the argument accumulates. By the end, I have absorbed a social thesis without ever feeling lectured. That is the craft.
The Difference Between Argument and Digression
A common misreading of essayistic chapters treats them as indulgences. The critic assumes the novelist could not resist lecturing the reader. However, we have seen that Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” is not a wayward indulgence but an intentional filter to establish the terms of the romance. Hugo’s digressions, on the other hand, are not mere distractions but the social thesis that the narrative alone could not sustain. Lastly, Steinbeck’s interchapters are not interruptions but the novel’s argumentative backbone.
The essayistic chapter is a structural choice wherein the novelist stops the story to argue because the story alone cannot carry the idea. Yet, the same structural choice can produce wandering digressions when the thesis does not connect to the narrative. A novel may pause for an essay that advances no argument tied to the story, contributing nothing to the reader’s understanding. The difference between productive and wandering essayistic chapters lies in the connection between argument and narrative.
Hugo’s sewer digression works because it ties directly to Jean Valjean’s escape and the novel’s argument about social waste. A digression about Parisian fashion trends would not work, even if written in the same essayistic mode. In my reading, the framework applies when the essayistic chapter serves the novel’s larger purpose, and it does not apply when the chapter serves only the author’s whim.
Synthesis: Three Patterns, One Device
The three novelists examined here use the same device—the essayistic chapter—in three different structural patterns, and the difference lies in how each novelist positions the argument within the narrative: Hawthorne concentrates the argument at the threshold, Hugo distributes it across the entire novel, and Steinbeck alternates it systematically.
The pattern matters because it determines the reader’s experience: Hawthorne filters, Hugo accumulates, and Steinbeck integrates, so each pattern produces a different relation between narrative and argument. The essayistic chapter and the narrative chapter exist in tension, and the novelist decides how much tension to create and when to release it. The three patterns thus represent three answers to the same question: how much argument can a novel hold without breaking its narrative frame?
Toward the End of Time: John Updike’s Experiment in Emptiness
This article examines how novelists pause their narratives to argue, catalog, or meditate. Two older posts on this site complement that inquiry from different angles. The article “Can Fiction Be Philosophical?” explores how novels carry complex ideas through voice, character, and scene without slipping into abstraction—a question at the heart of Hugo’s digressions and Steinbeck’s interchapters. The review of “Updike’s Toward the End of Time” analyzes a novel structured around a narrator whose consciousness lacks stability, a case study in how digressive form can serve thematic purpose. Together, these posts build a fuller picture of how fiction thinks, whether through essayistic interruption or through the journal of a man who has lost the thread of his own life.
Further Reading
Intercalary chapter on Wikipedia
