If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet want...
All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the only real subject, the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established...