Critics have argued that The Diviners is a künstlerroman (a novel that follows the growth and development of an artist, like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).[6] According to Nora Stovel, Laurence uses three methods to dramatize Morag's creative development: "first, she employs a tripartite educational model of reading, critiquing, and writing. Moreover, she includes mentors – Christie Logan, Miss Melrose, and Brooke Skelton – who teach Morag to read and write. Most important, she embeds Morag's fictions in the narrative to illustrate her literary development".[7] In addition to being a künstlerroman, the Diviners is metafiction, as it dramatizes Morag's internal and external life as a writer. This is evident in the way Laurence frames the novel with “images of Morag, the writer, seated at her kitchen table in front of the window, overlooking the river, trying to write, in the Now of the novel”.[7] These images dominate the frame sections of the novel – the first section, River of Now and Then, and the last section, The Diviners. Stovel notes that Morag reflects Laurence herself, and that she gives the reader a glimpse into her creative process through her focal character.[7] Hence the metafictional elements of the novel can also be read as self-reflexive, as they reflect Laurence writing her novel in her cabin on the Otonabee River.[7]
According to scholar Brenda Beckman-Long, genre and gender are intricately linked in The Diviners, and the novel is "a hybrid of realism, autobiographical and confessional genres" that combine "to establish the authority of a female perspective".[6] She considers the ending of the novel, which suggests that Morag's life story has come to an end as the novel reaches its conclusion, and reads the text as an autobiography.[6] Further supporting this point are the numerous interior monologues that pervade the novel. For Beckman-Long, these passages are reminiscent of narration in a film, and she cites a specific line from the novel: "A popular misconception is that we can’t change the past – everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it”. Aside from these autobiographical elements, Laurence also employs literary realism, which is evidenced by her "ostensibly objective third-person narrator".[6] These techniques are blended to create Morag's life story.
The Manawaka Cycle is part of a Canadian modernist movement, and thus many of Laurence's novels make use of modernist techniques.[8] In The Diviners, Laurence eschews linearity, and the text shifts through time and space to produce the effect of simultaneity. As a literary technique, simultaneity is characterized by the “concurrent presentation of elements from different places, multiple points-of-view, [and] radically disconnected segments of time".[9] For instance, the opening section of The Diviners, titled River of Now and Then,suggests "two levels of narrative" and conveys the simultaneity of past and present.[7] (This is also demonstrated in the novel's opening line: "The river flowed both ways".) Throughout the novel, past and present interweave; they are irrevocably connected so that the reader's sense of time is distorted. Finally, critic Richard Lane brings in the issue of gender, and argues that the novel “foregrounds simultaneity as a major component of écriture féminine, the protagonist Morag Gunn and her Métis daughter shifting the focus of the cycle to class, ethnicity and history".[8]
