Jonathan Franzen’s most recent novel, Freedom, is a sweeping epic that seeks to define its titular ideal in relationship with the modern American landscape: that of freedom. The novel presents the reader with four main characters: All dissatisfied, horribly lonely, and seek freedom. Notions of freedom in the novel are equated with meaning itself and for the characters (Patty, Walter, Richard, and Joey) without freedom; there is no meaning of their lives. Thus, Freedom becomes an examination where the American culture seeks meaning to justify their own existence. A large bulk of Freedom is taken up by a book-within-a-book that can be referred to as “Patty’s autobiography” which first appears in Part II as a form of therapy suggested by Patty’s therapist. We tend to associate revelation and self-discovery with the psychoanalytic encounter and the process of writing as expressive, healing, and cathartic, and see literature as a way of knowing. Franzen uses these notions to carefully bait the reader with Patty’s story and allows the reader to seek and find how the autobiography articulates, embodies, and comments upon the novel’s main line of force. Structuring the novel, the majority of the first third of the book and the second to last chapter are told entirely from Patty’s perspective in the mode of her autobiography. The other characters in the novel have their stories told by an outside narrator that sets Patty apart automatically amongst the cast. Following the story told within the autobiography, and comparing its presence as a central conflict in the remainder of the novel suggests that there is a greater purpose of fiction in regards to notions of freedom. The novel argues that the act of telling one’s own story and said story being received is freedom in itself. Freedom is not an absence of barriers and obstacles that allows us to do whatever we desire; instead, freedom is fiction.
