Intrusive narrators
August 27th, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |
I love intrusive narrators.
The more garrulous, interfering, self-conscious, the better.
Intrusive narrators remind us that someone is telling this story, that the story does not exist without the telling. It’s like the classic distinction between ’showing’ and ‘telling’ in narrative. The narrator who shows is invisible, letting his characters speak for themselves. Conversely, for the intrusive narrator, the telling is part of the story, and the narrator one of its characters.
Some examples:
In Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, the narrator is ostensibly telling us the story of the Baudelaire children, with occasional references to himself. As the series progresses, Snicket becomes more of a character in his own right, even possibly meeting the children on two occasions.
Like Lemony Snicket, the narrator of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair occasionally speaks to us in the first person despite delivering a predominantly third-person narrative. The narrator explains how he met some of the characters, thus implicating himself as a character in his own right; but at other points he displays the traits of the omniscient narrator, revealing his characters’ feelings.
The curious narrator of Philip Pullman’s wonderful ghost story, Clockwork, polarises his desire to judge and to narrate. The main body of the text tells us the story, while boxed inserts peppered throughout the narrative pass judgment on the characters’ actions.
In B.S. Johnson’s novel, the narrator poses specifically as the author of Christy’s story, with absolute power over the protagonist’s fate. At one point, the ‘author’ engages in dialogue with Christy, discussing the possible future (or lack of) for his character, much as the producers of Eastenders seem to do on a regular basis.
Stories with instrusive narrators are relational narratives, where we witness not only the story itself, but also the story of its telling.
They also remind us, sometimes beautifully, that a text is an utterance, existing in time. Unlike the Word, which is literally synonymous with its author, most stories have a tangible, physical presence in the world that is distinct from whatever created them. A spoken story can be heard, interpreted, and re-told by its audience. A written story can be re-read, re-printed, re-appropriated and performed in infinite circumstances.
The invisible narrator creates the illusion of the text as an absolute - the story exists, and we are invited to witness it. The intrusive narrator turns the text into something finite, something created. In these cases, the reader is not just witnessing a performance; he is part of the conversation. The intrusive narrator dares us to challenge him, to disagree, to re-tell the story in our own words.
Authorship is a process in which we all participate, all of the time.
