The "Art" Of The Personal Essay

So, as you all know (Sorry, that was a little narcissistic. you may very well not know), my knowledge of what an essay exactly is has been getting farther and farther away from me as I have progressed in my Intro To Essay course at Ithaca. Again, this is not a bad thing. I think it's a great thing, and I would like to talk about a friend of mine (Well, I wish...) that only helped me become less knowledgable about the essay, but helped me become more knowledgable as a writer, Phillip Lopate.

Lopate's work in "The Art Of The Personal Essay" has certainly laid some ground for me as to what I can do as an Essayist. What I think has affected me the most is his ideas on "The Idler Figure". Lopate describes the idler figure as something that can give the writer the ability to have a more personal feel. To be more specific, many times the idler figure can have the feel of someone who's just going on rambling about whatever may pop into their head. this sort of thing makes me think of Virginia Woolf and her style of writing. As much as I love her work (She is probably my favorite writer. Not a creative pick, I know), sometimes it just seems to eloquent to count as what Lopate is describing.

But then I found the best example of what I was looking for. Montaigne's "Of Books" gave the best example for me of a man who could truly portray himself, the narrator, the speaker, as the idler figure. He truly gave me feel of an old man that was just rambling on whatever came to his mind. It's not as bad as it sounds. I mean it to be a good thing. You'd get it if you read it. What he also does is put himself on the level of the reader. He basically makes every confession about his thinking as a writer that most writers want to keep from their readers. Montaigne tells me that he reads many books, but often times to does understand them. He even goes as far as to tell me that when he does read a book that he understands, he forgets it easily?  Really? That's pretty honest of the guy. But I love it.

Another element of the idler figure is surely the ability for a character or persona to be in the action, however connecting with the reader one what the main ideas are of the writing. No one did this better, in my opinion, than F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Great Gatsby". Nick Caraway was described as a character that was "within and without". He was the best observer in the history of literature, while still being one of the central characters of the novel. This is how I connected with him so easily, and how the books like "The Great Gatsby" and "This Side Of Paradise" become some of my most treasured reads.

So, to sum it up, I still don't know what an essay is, and writers like Woolf, Fitzgerald, Montaigne, and Lopate are the ones who are making me better at not knowing what it is every single day.