A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Published 1964 · 240 pages · 43,894 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · LGBTQ+ Fiction, Literary Fiction

How hard is A Single Man to read?

A Single Man scores 77 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
The text employs a sophisticated literary vocabulary, including philosophical and psychological terms, and specific jargon (e.g., "pylorus," "atheromatous plaque," "chlamys," "nisei") that require a strong vocabulary or contextual inference. While not consistently archaic or invented like 'Finnegans Wake,' the precise and varied word choice elevates it beyond accessible contemporary fiction, placing it above '2666' in this regard.
Sentence structure: 75 out of 100
Sentences are frequently long and multi-clausal, often incorporating parenthetical asides and complex subordination to reflect George's stream of consciousness. The narrative voice and internal monologues demand sustained attention to navigate their intricate grammatical structures and rhetorical flourishes, making it more demanding than '2666' but not reaching the extreme hypotaxis of 'The Golden Bowl'.
Abstraction: 82 out of 100
The narrative consistently moves beyond concrete events to delve into George's philosophical musings on identity, time, death, societal critique, and the nature of human experience. Events serve as springboards for extensive abstract thought, symbolism (e.g., the freeway, the rock pools), and intellectual debates, making the content highly theoretical, akin to the metaphysical digressions found in 'Gravity's Rainbow'.
Information density: 78 out of 100
The text is packed with concepts, observations, and allusions per page, requiring high attention demands. George's internal monologues interweave social commentary, literary references (Huxley, Tennyson, Greek myths), and psychological analysis, creating a rich, multi-layered intellectual experience that is more dense than '2666' but less overwhelming than 'Ulysses'.
Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
The narrative frequently employs a detached, third-person perspective, initially referring to George's waking self as 'it,' requiring readers to infer his internal states and motivations. Extended internal monologues, such as the 'Uncle George' fantasy, present George's suppressed rage and desires indirectly, demanding active interpretation. This sustained psychological depth and the narrator's clinical distance necessitate more inference than direct exposition, placing it above 'The Great Gatsby' (65) in its demands on the reader.
Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
The text is rich with symbolic elements, including the sagging bridge as a threshold of grief, the ants representing George's struggle against futility, and the 'chauffeur-figure' symbolizing his disassociation. George himself often engages in explicit symbolic interpretation, such as his lengthy discourse on the 'American Motel-Room' as a symbol of the American way of life. The culminating 'rock pools' metaphor for individual and universal consciousness provides a dense, abstract layer of meaning, comparable to the pervasive symbolism found in 'To the Lighthouse' (82).
Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
Isherwood maintains a consistent ironic distance, evident in George's self-aware internal monologues and the narrator's subtle critiques of societal norms and George's own coping mechanisms. George's performative speeches, like his hyperbolic defense of American motels, and his appreciation for Charlotte's 'wonderful lack of perception,' highlight a significant gap between surface interactions and underlying realities. This pervasive, often humorous, irony is more pronounced than in 'The Great Gatsby' (70) and shares a similar critical edge to 'Lolita' (75) in its manipulation of perspective.
Resolution withholding: 85 out of 100
The narrative consistently resists conventional closure, particularly regarding George's emotional state, his relationships, and his ultimate fate. Jim's death remains an unresolved emotional core, and George's impulsive plans for the future are immediately undercut by the narrative's explicit contemplation of his imminent death. The final, philosophical 'rock pools' metaphor leaves the meaning of life and death profoundly ambiguous, creating an existential open-endedness that surpasses the closed plot but open meaning of 'The Great Gatsby' (60) and approaches the profound ambiguities of 'Infinite Jest' (88).
Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
While largely linear within a single day, the text's structural complexity arises from George's extensive flashbacks, philosophical digressions, and the personification of his mental states (e.g., the 'chauffeur-figure' and 'talking-head'). The initial use of the pronoun 'it' for George's waking self and the final shift to a clinical yet poetic description of death, followed by the abstract 'rock pools' metaphor, represent deliberate formal experiments. This is more complex than a simple retrospective narrative like 'The Great Gatsby' (55) but less fragmented or multi-voiced than 'Midnight's Children' (68).

How A Single Man is regarded

A Single Man holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where A Single Man sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (81 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, A Single Man scores 74 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
Symbol: Formal
Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not.
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy iv (Tragic Pathos) (irony iv)
Let us suppose this, merely. (The body on the bed is still snoring.)
Genre: Novel + Confession
Waking up begins with saying am and now.

Where the story of A Single Man takes place

  • Santa Monica beach colony and Los Angeles, a December day in 1962, the main setting

6 things that are true of A Single Man, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator describes George's body at the start as an 'it' that does not know its own name until the final line of the opening chapter.

    It knows its name. It is called George.

  2. George is fifty-eight and has just been to the mirror before heading to San Tomas State College.

    Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into, during its fifty-eight years

  3. George teaches Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer and quotes the title in class.

    'After many a summer dies the swan.'

  4. The Cuban missile crisis is a recent event, referenced as one that had made shoppers buy supplies a month earlier.

    Hardly more than a month ago, before Khrushchev agreed to pull his rockets out of Cuba, they were cramming the markets

  5. Kenny leaves a note and pyjamas on George rather than staying the night.

    Thought maybe I'd better split, after all. I like to wander around at night.

  6. The book closes with a hypothetical coronary that kills George in his sleep.

    Very well – let us suppose that this is the night, and the hour, and the appointed minute.

Scenes in A Single Man that Frye would name

18 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
They die without warning at their posts. The imagined coronary is the pathos of George himself, a death staged and left suppositional.
Displacement, untitled
Waking up begins with saying am and now. Waking is staged as a body reassembling itself from non-being, a resurrection pattern under realistic motive.
Confession, untitled
It is here that he stops short and knows, with a sick newness, almost as though it were for the first time: Jim is dead. Is dead. A sustained introverted register of grief, in which the interior consciousness is the real subject.
Anatomy, untitled
Mr Propter has no sex-life. This makes him unconvincing as a character. The classroom 'inquest' on Huxley is a catalogue of ideological opinions, a miniature symposium.
Pathos, untitled
Doris's room is on the top floor. Doris's dying, and George's reflection on Jim's instant death, is the novel's sacrificial scene.
Anatomy, untitled
Therefore we must launch a campaign of systematic terror. In order to be effective, this will require an organisation of at least five hundred highly skilled killers and torturers The Uncle George fantasy is an encyclopedic, satiric catalogue of retribution.

Books that share these scenes with A Single Man

About the author

Christopher Isherwood