In a recent lecture, the acclaimed novelist Amit Chaudhuri explored the apparently defining, but for him increasingly puzzling, question of why he writes novels. In the course of that exploration, he responds to an accusation which seemingly undermines that question and which has greeted his fiction from the start of his literary career: that insofar as his work lacks any real interest in narrative or story, he doesn't write novels at all. In this chapter, I first draw on the work of the philosopher Stephen Mulhall to show how (amongst other things) Chaudhuri’s denial of the dramatic identifies him as a modernist realist novelist; I then associate this denial, and his lecture’s motivating question, with a certain perfectionist conception of the self developed by Stanley Cavell.