Montaigne/Austen Essay

    If someone was to write down every thought that came to their mind it would be impossible to do it.. Our brains processes  information so fast that expressing or explaining what we mean will barely scratch the surface of one tiny thought. David Foster Wallace attested to this statement in his 2001 story “Good old Neon” Montaigne's Essays demonstrate this as he wrote 107 essays characterized under 3 different books. Personal experiences and stream of consciousness are the two areas that Montaigne develops his style from. In opposition to David Foster Wallace and Montaigne, Jane Austen takes a different standpoint with a more traditional and organized approach to writing her novel, Pride and Prejudice.

    Montaigne and Wallace have similar views on the fact that its almost impossible to write down your feelings in exact detail. In Montaigne’s Essays he demonstrates this by writing 107 essays out of stream of consciousness that don’t exactly point to a clear theme.. Each essay is interconnected and leads to another. He writes the essays in a way like a thinking process. After every thought he has an essay that resembles it, but he only scratches the surface of each thought and then moves on to the next. In a way Montaigne does have some organization when writing the essays. For example, each essay is drawn from personal experiences and is categorized into 3 different books.

    Jane Austen contradicts David Foster Wallace’s thinking with her romantic novel, Pride and Prejudice. The organization and and traditional narrative style suggests that things can be explained directly through writing. The fact that her writing of Pride and Prejudice is satirical also opposes the style and rhetoric of David Foster Wallace. In Montaigne's style he focuses on understanding the human condition in general. Austen's purpose is to reflect the ignorance of the people during her time period. To do this she would utilize her characters such as Mrs. Bennet.

    With Montaigne's stream of thought and conventional writing and Austen’s organized, satirical narrative, they both are confrontational in their styles. Even though both Montaigne and Austen contradict each other, they still come to the same conclusion. No matter what they write about they can barely sketch out a guideline for what they really are thinking. This concept relates to much more than just Montaigne and Austen it relates to all other pieces of literature as well. Through every form of writing there hasn’t been a time and will probably never will be a time where thoughts will be explained exactly how they are thought.