The shape of the novel has been changing fast, particularly over the last few decades. Naturally, that applies to the situation not only of Slovak novels. An analogical development, always with specific features resulting from a concrete social situation, is to be seen in fiction in both East and West. The essential starting point to these changes is formed by social circumstances, trends in social development. Fiction, and particularly the novel, mirrors that development, aims at giving an individual a definite place in the social process, in a changing life, and compares the potential of an individual with the potential of society, with what society has "on offer".