Montaigne/Austen Essay

Everyone has a different perspective on life and if one person was to try to understand every aspect of someone else's they would miss the big picture and they would be easily confused. This is similar to something that David Foster Wallace said in his 2001 story, "Good Old Neon." After reading Montaigne's essays, it is easy to see that he thinks the same way. Montaigne jumps around with his ideas and perspective on everything while Jane Austen is very much to the point and uses a lot of structure.

Montaigne, like Wallace, scatters his thoughts and makes it difficult for the reader to keep up with what is being read. However, Montaigne's essays are a window into his life and views on a number of topics.  The reader is able to picture almost exactly what Montaigne writes. Montaigne uses stream of consciousness throughout his essays while writing about his feelings towards death, life, friendships, religion, politics and education. This is very evident when he is discussing something then drifts into another topic as it comes to his mind. He will be writing something very specific which will lead him to a number of new thoughts and ideas with a broader spectrum.  Montaigne shows his vast knowledge by making many references to the bible, philosophers and other writers. On the other side, he is also able to write about personal topics that some may not expect because they could be considered too personal for the public to know about. In all of these scattered ways, Montaigne writes very similar to David Foster Wallace's view on the world.

On the other hand, there is Jane Austen, who writes very organized and with a lot of structure.  Jane Austen writes with a plan; she knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants the reader to feel when they read her work. This is almost the exact opposite of how Montaigne wrote his essays. Austen's Pride and Prejudice flows smoothly from one chapter to the next and the whole story is connected together by one overall plot and theme. One aspect of the two works is that they both have a single narrator; Montaigne in his essays and the character Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice was restricted in some of the things that could have been incorporated because of the time period that the story was set in however Montaigne's essays are timeless and anyone can relate to them no matter what year it is. In this way, I would say that Montaigne's essays serve a greater purpose because they can help anyone gain a wider perspective of the world and it doesn't matter what time period they are accustomed to.

The statement,"What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant" by David Foster Wallace has so much meaning in both Montaigne's essays and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, yet the two works are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One is free thoughts put into essays about so many important ideas while the other is a fully structured novel with complete organization. The wonderful thing about one single idea is that there are so many pieces that are completely different yet they can all perfectly portray this idea in all of their different ways.