Example of a Psychological Novel
Drafting / / July 04, 2021
Dive into the psychic insides of his characters. I present, as an example, some paragraphs from National Episodes, by Benito Pérez Galdós:
"I can say by comparing my spirit with that of Ines, and scrutinizing the radical difference between one and the other, that hers had a center of hers and mine did not. Mine wandered, carried and brought by various impressions, by sudden and contradictory feelings: my faculties were as wandering meteors that as soon as they glow as they darken, as soon as they march as they collide, according to the influence received from superiors bodies; while his were a complete planetary system, drawn, set in motion and heated by the great sun of his pure consciousness.
Someone will scoff at these psychological indications that I wish were as exact as my dark intelligence conceives them; Someone will find the presentation of such a heroine worthy of laughter, and they will make a thousand fuss when they see that I have wanted to make a laughable Beatrice with the materials of a dressmaker; But these taunts don't matter to me, and I continue. Since I met Ines, I have loved her in the strangest way you can imagine: a lively inclination dragged my heart towards her; but this inclination was like the worship that we pay to an indisputable superiority, like the faith that occupies us by sublimating the noblest of our being; but always leaving a part of him free for the passions of the world. So, without ceasing to be Inés for me the first of all women, I believed that I could love others with a love appropriate to the circumstances of each moment of life. I have observed that those who dedicate themselves to an ideal almost never do so completely, and leave a part of themselves for the world to which they are attached, even if only because of the ground they walk on. I make this annoying observation in case it helps to clarify the peculiar state of my soul before such a noble creature. And she was a dressmaker, a dressmaker! Complementary bibliography, N '40)