Gore Vidal is an author who genuinely seems to enjoy making political statements; his third novel, The City and the Pillar, was blacklisted for years. In addition to making political statements in his works, Vidal also includes overarching themes and symbols, earning him the title of one of the better literary writers of the twentieth century. In his works Messiah, Myra Breckinridge, and The City and the Pillar, Vidal narrates the stories of Eugene, Myra, and Jim, who all dedicate themselves towards a single desire or goal. In the process, though, each character commits morally questionable actions, and each character meets a ruin or downfall. Because his novels convey stories in which characters suffer as a consequence of fixation and manipulation…show more content… For The City and the Pillar and Messiah, the readers learn about the consequences of the novels’ protagonists before learning about the main events of the story. To set up the framework in The City and the Pillar, the first chapter describes Jim getting drunk at a bar, and the rest of the novel takes place in the past, describing the events leading up to Jim’s emotional breakdown. In Messiah, readers learn about Eugene’s exile from the United States in the second chapter, which also sets up framework taking place after the rise of Caveism. Myra Breckinridge describes only the present, but the diary-style format of each chapter reveals the end result before describing the events that happened. Through revealing the outcomes before the main events, Vidal makes readers ponder the result while reading the main events. Vidal’s protagonists become ruined, so readers will thinking about each character’s downfall throughout the novel. In this way, Vidal enforces his theme of self-destructive obsession by using structure to emphasize that his protagonists will find a less-than-happy ending through their
