Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #821

In her seminal critique of the nineteenth-century novelist Elias Thorne, Dr. Arisawa posits that Thorne’s predilection for fragmented narratives was not, as his contemporaries derisively claimed, a symptom of "an undisciplined mind unable to wrangle a coherent plot." Rather, Arisawa argues, it was a deliberate epistemological critique: Thorne fractured his storytelling to mirror the Victorian anxiety that emerging scientific empiricism could not adequately map the vast, contradictory landscape of human subjectivity. By deliberately withholding narrative resolution, Thorne was mocking the very idea of absolute, observable truth. Based on the text, what would Dr. Arisawa most likely say about the nineteenth-century critics who reviewed Thorne’s work?