It has become almost a truism that the novel as a literary form carries the signatures of the contemporary—both politically and aesthetically. To verify such abstract claims is barely possible, but it remains a fact that a dominant portion of contemporary novel writing features situations of crisis, unrest, and instability. This is true for DeLillo's historical outcasts in their endeavors to gauge the signatures of the contemporary historical moment; the same sense of insecurity pervades the worlds of Morrison's Beloved and A Mercy; and Philip Roth's American trilogy uncovers the aporias of traditional identity models at the junction of historical writing and ethnic self-fashioning. Whatever its relation to the end of the Cold War, the contemporary historical novel portrays not sovereign agents but individuals who are forced into coping with moments of deficiency and incompletion. As a genre, the novel presents individuals as they respond to the unpredictability of human life and history.

Maybe no one saw this clearer than Georg Lukács in his early essays on European literature and philosophy. For Lukács, the novel's emergence as a literary form is triggered not just by the realization that the world as it used to be has become incomprehensible; it is the individual's inability to determine his or her very own place in the world that creates a dominating sense of alienation and religio-philosophical vacuity. This is an early modernist moment, defined by the growing awareness that we can no longer believe in the charter of metaphysics. Nietzsche's Gay Science captures this moment in the image of the madman who is running through the streets with a lantern—despite bright daylight—and shouting “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The same idea is expressed in William James's assumption of “a world of pure experiences,” and the popular psychoanalytical analogy can be found in Freud's notion of the ego that is no longer “master in its own house.”

In the Theory of the Novel (1915), this moment of incompletion is defined as one of homelessness, and the story of the novel's hero, consequently, as the attempt to symbolically return back home. It is a moment “in which neither goals nor paths are established before-hand” and the modern world is still in the making.