Peter L. Berger's Novels of Precarious Vision

Peter L. Berger's two novels, The Enclaves (1965) and Protocol of a Damnation (1975), are more than mere diversions from his discursive sociological writing. An examination of both his fiction and nonfiction reveals the homology Berger sees between sociology and literature as forms of consciousness, as complementary versions of "the precarious vision." Berger uses his fiction to experiment with the cracks that reveal an "other condition" lying behind the ordered, taken-for-granted reality of everyday life. The novels also serve as suggestive treatises on how one may "cheat" fictive social reality in order to pursue an authentic existence.