Charles Baxter: Sonia’s Last Speech (July 2006)

Charles Baxter examines Sonia’s closing speech in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as a lens to look at sentimentality in relation to the need to fend off despair in fiction. While Sonia’s speech at first feels unconvincing even to her, Baxter argues, at a certain point she begins to “believe her own stories”; this complicated moment produces a kind of “double-voicing,” or a tension between what is real and what is hoped for.  Baxter goes on to discuss double-voicing in work by Paula Fox, Gustave Flaubert, and Donald Justice.