3. TYPES OF NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN BRITISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE Intro: There are basically 3 different kinds of point point of view: view: •
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1st person limited (presents the point of view of only one character's consciousness. The reader is restricted to the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of that single character. E.g. Poe: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”) 3rd person limited (the narrator takes us inside one or two characters; the reader experiences the story through the senses and thoughts of just one character; e.g. Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown, Joyce: “The Dead” -> Gabriel) 3rd person omniscient (the narrator takes us inside the character[s]; e.g. Austen, Thackeray, Dickens)
The au author ma may be be co consiste stent in in th the po point of of vi view, ew, or or sh shifting, in in wh which case the point of view of one character may change, he may move into and out of the story (Faulkner: As (Faulkner: As I Lay Dying , Sound and Fury) Fury ) or the point of view of several characters may tell the story (Mark Twain: “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, Conrad: Heart of Darkness) Darkness)
A) 1st person limited: William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily” (1930) Intro: Faulkner’s shorts story “A Rose for Emily” provides a special kind of 1 st person limited type narration: the 1st person plural narrative. The narrator: • unnamed narrator not the main character > provides a special perspective > reveals information about Miss • Emily, her father and the town that the main character may ever reveal to the reader (the main character would present the story in another way, maybe by making herself more sympathetic, rationalising her behaviour, minimising the essence of horror) details the strange circumstances of Emily’s life and her odd relationships with her father, her • lover, and the town of Jefferson, and the horrible secret she hides serves as the town’s collective voice • Critics have debated whether it is: • o a man or woman o a former lover of Emily Grierson’s o the boy who remembers the sight of Mr. Grierson in the doorway, holding the whip the town gossip o in any case, the narrator hides behind the collective pronoun we (we = the narrator + the townspeople)
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By using we, the narrator can attribute what might be his or her own thoughts and opinions to all of the townspeople, turning private ideas into commonly held beliefs . shifting from “we” to “they” at the end > deepens the mystery of who the narrator is > the narrator distances himself from the action (up until he grouped himself with the townspeople) > quick and subtle shift; returns to “we” in the following passage reliability of the narrator: the narrator comes across, on reflection, as reliable, in part because of his objectivity in reporting events and in understanding the agents in the primary action of the story ( e.g. the unreliable, mad narrator in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”) objectivity of the narrator : even-handedness and broad sympathy o able to imagine the different mentalities of Emily, her father, and Homer Baron able to understand, in a sympathetic way, how these are conditioned by their individual histories (their social backgrounds in confrontation with the particular circumstances in which they find themselves) this kind of sympathetic understanding does not necessarily entail that the person who has it endorses or condones what he understands o “balance” in maintaining his own ethical perspective while being able to enter into, and examine “from the inside”, ethical perspectives alien to his own Limitations of the 1 st person narrator : o the narrator did not have the ability to reveal Miss Emily’s actions inside her household reports of incorrect assumptions (e.g. they thought Homer and Emily were married) o o we gain no insight into Miss Emily’s thoughts o tells the story in retrospect > a hint that the narrator did not fully understand the meaning of the events as they occurred cannot be omniscient
Faulkner always has a purpose in choosing which different stylistic technique to use at which point in his stories: The narrative devices mirror the psychological complexity of the short stories' characters and settings.
B) Shifting point of view – 1 st person multiple narrators: Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902) •
Joseph Conrad renewed the narrative aspect of prose writing the novel is remarked by an anonymous narrator so Marlow (the actual narrator) is just ONE of the narrators
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multiplicity: makes an attempt to make the narration wider and it also avoids the danger that the narrator should know everything a human being is limited and cannot know everything unlike the omniscient narrator who does know everything a broader view is more promising for the sake of learning as much as possible
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the main narrative : Marlow’s story of a voyage up the Congo River that he took as a young man
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frame narrative : Marlow’s narrative is framed by another narrative, in which one of the listeners to Marlow’s story explains the circumstances in which Marlow tells it frame narrative : employs a narrative technique whereby an introductory main story is • composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for a fictive narrative or organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story the narrator who begins Heart of Darkness is unnamed, as are the other three listeners, who • are identified only by their professional occupations (the Director of Companies, Lawyer, Accountant) the narrator usually speaks in the first-person plural, describing what all four of Marlow’s • listeners think and feel
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for the narrator and his fellow travellers, the Thames conjures up images of famous British explorers who have set out from that river on glorious voyages • the narrator’s attitude (the frame narrative’s n.) is that these men promoted the glory of Great Britain, expanded knowledge of the globe, and contributed to the civilization and enlightenment of the rest of the planet from the moment Marlow opens his mouth (in the frame n.), he sets himself apart from his fellow passengers by conjuring up a past in which Britain was not the heart of civilization but the savage “end of the world” – likewise, the Thames was not the source of glorious journeys outward but the ominous beginning of a journey inward, into the heart of the wilderness Marlow as a storyteller narrates in an ironic tone, giving the impression that his audience’s assumptions are wrong, but not presenting a clear alternative to those assumptions •
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“onion structure”: envelopes/layers can be moved (but at the end we will find nothing!) the important message is not in the heart of the novel but in its “environment” the important • things like the meaning are outside in the surroundings the narrator tells us that to Marlow, "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze" this comment suggests that the meaning of Marlow's encounter with Kurtz can be found not in the • experience itself, but in the telling of the story - a transaction between Marlow and his listeners •
Conrad Marlowe
Other minor, restricted sources of information Kurtz (“hollow at the core” > we reach nothing)
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flashbacks: the narrator tells his story in a flashback which he tells about Marlow’s experiences in the • African jungle specifically on the Congo river the story of Marlow about his journey is also a flashback • foreshadowing: • perhaps the best example of this is when Marlow is examined by the Doctor, who alludes to the “changes in individuals” that have been out in the Congo after Marlow visited his aunt he also had “a startled pause” at going on to Africa. He was • very wary of this because, being a seaman, he left his temporary “land” home all the time.
C) 3rd person (limited) omniscient narrator: John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) The identity of the story-teller is always ambiguous in Fowles’ novel as well; however from another aspect. Fowles cleverly uses a number of different "voices" throughout his novel, that is there are several narrative presences that can be differentiated. 3 outstanding narrative features: dual time scheme more than one ending the question: who the author/narrator is dual time scheme: 1) one of the time schemes resembles the 19th century social milieu and style of writing novels: 1867 (setting) 2) the other chronological layer covers the 19th century, it is related to 1967 (time of writing the novel blended into the setting) 3 endings: •
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"in media res" (in the middle of things) beginning > the events are unfolded in retrospect > can be confusing, but this technique serves to increase the suspense and tension time is played with - events are shown as though in sequence, when in fact they are happening at the same time, in parallel; sometimes events which have already happened are not revealed until later on the reader is deliberately told by Fowles that he has "cheated" by creating three different endings and he even appears in an enigmatic disguise as an anonymous bearded character to turn back his watch and give us the last, existential ending.
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1) (Charles Smithson is supposed to marry Ernestina Freeman but gets acquainted with Sarah Woodruff and changes his mind, but then …) … Charles returns to Ernestina and accepts the well-known conventional 19 th century pattern of marital life and the tedious burden which is supposed to go with it 2) (however, the novel goes on: Sarah leaves the scene, Charles is eager to find her, follows her possible way even to the New World and finally finds her in London) it turns out that due to the romance of Charles and Sarah a little girl was born whose presence provides a rather favourable ending of a family reunion after so many obstacles 3) but then comes the 3rd ending which is not as satisfying as the 2 nd: Sarah refuses to restore their relationship the disturbing final ending is due to the incompetence of the of the male protagonist in effectuating his own rights as a father; the 3rd ending is not as satisfying as the rather favourable 2nd one would have been > the reader is left in a certain uneasiness the narrator’s persona: • voice of the narrator has a double vision: The novel starts off with an intrusive omniscient, typically Victorian, voice: “ I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb has changed very little .” The narrator makes it a point to insist that very little has changed in Lyme Regis since the nineteenth century to the present day. > The narrator deftly moves between the two centuries and comments on the present day events in the same tone in which he comments on the Victorian period. 1) We hear the voice of narrator as a formal, stiff Victorian tone while narrating the events in the novel yet the content of what he says is contemporary. 2) The illusion of a Victorian novel is soon broken by a narrator, who introduces his modern 20 century point of view. Fowles as both an internal and an external narrator intrudes into the story (cf. the author writes the work, the narrator tells the story) •
freedom of narrative movement : Fowles' use of third person omniscient narration in The French Lieutenant's Woman allows him to shift the focalization (‘who sees?’ vs. narration = ‘who speaks?’) from character to character in the story as he moves from scene to scene (“Charles felt”; “Charles thought”; Mrs. Poulteney “reflected”; “She [Ernestina] became lost in a highly narcissistic self-contemplation”)
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this freedom of movement creates irony or suspense btw. what the reader is aware of and the limited perceptions of the characters HOWEVER, Fowles suspends this freedom with regard to the thoughts and motives of Sarah > Fowles does not allow the reader inside Sarah's mind > she remains an enigma within the text > supports the ambiguity of the various endings for the novel Fowles includes chapters in which the narrator reflects upon his own writing (e.g. Chapter 13) the narration become self-reflexive “I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of
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Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.” •
Chapter 13 admits that it is not the narrator who creates the novel “[Novelists] wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is […] We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.”
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The people within the novel’s story are in charge of the novel > the traditional narrator only puts it down in writing (=> the narrator cannot order them, tell them what to say) Roland Barthes: “Death of the Author” (1967) > the traditional author dies out; the continuity btw the terms author and authority is disrupted; the scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work & the scriptor is born simultaneously with the text
Conclusion: The narrative technique used in a text concerns both style and plot, and sometimes the characters. The person telling the story, and the perspective from which he tells it, have a tremendous influence on our appreciation and understanding of the work. The 1st person limited type narration gives immediacy and authority, but it is also limited in that the author must make the narrator-character credible, or we will not identify with or not believe what we are told. With this point of view, the reader must determine whether to trust or believe the narrator, as the reaction, even the interpretation, may depend on it, as in the case of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”. In case the work operates with shifting point of views, the reader may be interested in the narrator as much as the plot, or other characters. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a classic example. The narrator may take a 3 rd person limited point of view or may appear as an omniscient story-teller. As omniscient, he may be intrusive or invisible. If he is not involved in the story, not a character, it loses intimacy but gains authority. However, he may interrupt the story with his authoritarian voice as well, as Fowles does in his novel, successfully blending the diverse types of 3rd person narrations.
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