The Education of Henry Adams

From its inception, Adams thought of the Education as an experimental work of literature. A part-time novelist, the author here employs several of the devices of fiction. For example, the story is told through a third-person narrator who rarely goes inside the minds of subjects other than Henry. Henry himself is more of a literary device than a person. Adams tells his readers in the "Preface" of February 16, 1907, that Henry should be thought of as a "manikin, on which the toilet [attire] of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes." This is not a biography of a person; it is more a biography of an education: "The object of study is the garment, not the figure." Nor does the story have to rely on fact. Like a good novelist, Adams is more interested in truth, whether the details fit or not, as he reveals when describing Henry's trip to Washington in 1850: "The actual journey may have been quite different, but the actual journey has no interest for education." The method and direction of this literary experiment carry his readers on a journey that is much like that of a novel. For illumination that is suggestive rather than definitive, it often relies on two devices that are found in various types of literature: symbol and theme.