The Last Word

Throughout the novel, Adams interweaves a range of disparate perspectives and textual excerpts to add nuance and complexity to the narrative. Within a single narrative, the most commonly used version of this device is the epistle: a letter embedded within a prose text. The use of epistles increased throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but the 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion of epistolary novels, which consist entirely of letters. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein and Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons are prime examples of epistolary novels. Unlike the traditional novel, which generally focuses on a unified first- or third-person narrative, the various letters and writings that make up epistolary novels allow for the interplay of multiple first-person narrators whose varying perspectives on the same events create a wealth of dramatic irony.

In the 20th century, the epistolary novel began to evolve significantly to include different kinds of texts, and the form was further enhanced by the advent of television and the internet, for with these rapidly evolving media, storytellers gained access to a wealth of new resources. As the line between literature and cinema became increasingly blurred, some film productions deliberately adopted the epistolary form that was previously the purview of literature alone, adapting this structure to a new medium and utilizing its unique approach to character development.