Unnatural Voices - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 7. Implied Authors, Historical Authors, and the Transparent Narrator: Toward a New Model of the Narrative Transaction */

2026-02-01T20:35:10Z

7. Implied Authors, Historical Authors, and the Transparent Narrator: Toward a New Model of the Narrative Transaction

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 *The standard model is Real author > Implied Author > (Narrator) > (Narratee) > Implied Reader > Real Reader
 == 8. Conclusion: Voicing the Unspeakable ==
+*Barthes: Narrators and characters are, essentially "paper beings". One can no longer presume the existence of a real human or a human-like narrator standing behind and above the discourse; in many works, there is only the discourse itself.

Robert.adlington: /* 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama */

2026-02-01T18:59:46Z

6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:59, 1 February 2026
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	== 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama ==		== 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama ==

	*		*In Beckett's "Not I", Mouth may be an image of a madwoman, a figure in hell, an allegory of the dispossessed, or a parody of authorial creation; she may be addressing the imagined voice of another, another version of herself, or the metadramatic image of a stage prompter. But more than anything else, the very physicality of this staging of a contaminated consciousness - the disembodied mouth and the unexplained auditor - ensures that no critical gesture will be able to unify these defiantly inorganic fragments.
			*Like contemporary fiction, modern drama has for some time transcended the simple, humanist narrator figure and has gone on to create "unnatural" narrators who exceed and subvert the limits of an individual consciousness.

	== 7. Implied Authors, Historical Authors, and the Transparent ~~Narrrator~~: Toward a New Model of the Narrative Transaction ==		== 7. Implied Authors, Historical Authors, and the Transparent Narrator: Toward a New Model of the Narrative Transaction ==

	*		*The standard model is Real author > Implied Author > (Narrator) > (Narratee) > Implied Reader > Real Reader

	== 8. Conclusion: Voicing the Unspeakable ==		== 8. Conclusion: Voicing the Unspeakable ==

	*		*

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction */

2026-01-31T12:12:18Z

3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:12, 31 January 2026
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	== 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction ==		== 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction ==

	*		*In Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", there is no single, self-consistent discursive subject in the text. We need to ask, "What is the narration doing now?" rather then, "Who is speaking here?" By following out the varied narrative voices, however, we find that they themselves constitute a kind of narrative that complements and underscores the central events and ideas of the story.
			*Nathalie Sarraute's "Tu ne t'aimes pas" is a representation of a collection of contiguous voices, some of them contradictory, that seem to form a single, decentered consciousness.
			*Zakes Mda (in "Ways of Dying"): "We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people's closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, "They say it once happened...," we are the "they"."
			*The "we" glides between the lone individual and the entire collective; between a strict and a more lax denotation; and between mental experiences that are entirely, partially, or minimally shared.
			*It is most useful to see the "we" narrator as a different kind of figure from the realistic type of first person narrator and more like a postmodern first person narrator who is not bound by the epistemological rules of realism.
			*Whereas most second person narration ascillates between these two poles (of 1st and 3rd"), "we" narration curiously occupies both at once.

	== 4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators ==		== 4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators ==

	*		*EM Forster: "A novelist can shift his viewpoint if it comes off, and it came off with Dickens and Tolstoy. Indeed this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting viewpoint is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge: - I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always."
			*In Christine Brooke-Rose's "Thru", the novel repeatedly reverses the hierarchy or narrative levels, transforming a narrated object into a narrating agent and vice versa. The very distinction between outside and inside, container and contained, narrating subject and narrated object, higher and lower level collapses, resulting in a paradox which the text itself puts in a nutshell; "Whoever you invented invented you too."
			*In Beckett's "The Unnameable", the narrative voice often refers to other characters and voices which it then discloses to be fictions invented by itself, as apparently independent persons are collapsed into a single narrative voice. On the other hand, the same narrator goes on to claim to have invented the frustrated narrators of other novels written by Beckett; the narrator of The Unnameable here seem to be impersonated its author. This narrative strategy does not merely problematize conventional theoretical distinctions, but undermines the very terms upon which such distinctions rest.

	== 5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability ==		== 5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability ==

	*		*Though Karen Lawrence uses the term "narrator" for ease of reference, she prefers "the concept of consciousness or mind of the text, since Joyce does everything possible in the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses to destroy our sense of a narrating, human voice.
			*The concept of a narrator implies a certain minimal discursive consistency that many late modern and postmodern authors reject; we should have a place for shifting, depersonalized, multivoiced texts that transcend or traduce the sensibility of a single narrator, a composite figure we may refer to as the "incommensurate narrator".
			*On the one hand, narrators may resemble actual people who tell stories; on the other hand, there may be no "they" there - with postmodern fiction, we often have mere discourse that unconvincingly occupies the space of a standard narrator. It is this rejection of the personified narrator that the figure of the interlocutor finally reveals.
			*In Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, the denarration is global and undermines the world it purports to depict; very little (if anything) is left over after the assaults of textual negation the narrative performs upon itself. These texts emphasize the "performative nature" of all narration.
			*It is the first person form of the denarrated that is generally most prevalent and, I believe, more compelling. I suspect this is because it invites more possible interpretive positions concerning the subjectivity of the narrator, as the reader wonders whether the narrator is incompetent, disoriented, devious, or insane. And, when an especially contradictory line appears, it comically throws all of these conceptual frames into disarray, as the entire mimetic framework of the narration is abruptly called into question.
			*All that is left for the narratologist to work with is the discourse, since all we know is the sequence in which the dubious events are presented or negated. At this point, a fundamental distinction at the foundation of modern narrative theory breaks down. Here, the usual separation between story and discourse collapses, and we are left with discourse without a retrievable story. The work's discourse is determinate; its story is inherently indeterminable.
			*With solipsistic narrators, seemingly disparate narrative voices turn out in the end to be mere projections of a single isolated consciousness. See, for example, Beckett's "Company".
			*The other, opposite tactic is the uncanny and inexplicable intrusion of the voice of another within the narrator's consciousness. I call such a figure a "permeable narrator". Unlike the solipsistic gambit, which is readily situated within existing theories of narration, this other movement threatens to violate the principle of an autonomous, individual consciousness that is presupposed by all current theories of the narrator.
			*The Unnameable emerges as one of the most defiantly anti-narrative works ever composed, in which al the basic elements of storytelling are negated. There is no determinable temporal or spatial setting, no characters to speak of, no events worth narrating, and no clear audience or motive for the narration. The main engine of the text is the compulsive voice that will not stop, and the primary drama of the text is the determination of the identity of the narrator and its voices. It provides one of the most extreme, fascinating, and outrageous demonstrations of the possibilities of narration in - and only possible in - a work of fiction.
			*Many postmodern narrators and voices have superseded the traditional figure of the narrator as a person who is telling a story and who is subject to the normal abilities and limitations of a human being or humanlike narrating agent:
			**The fraudulent narrator - who cannot possibly know what they know.
			**Contradictory narrators - leading to narrative chaos.
			**Permeable narrators - who merge and blend into one another in impossible ways.
			**Incommensurate narrators - who cannot be the single source of all the voices in the story.
			**Dis-framed narrators - who move from one level of a text to another.

	== 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama ==		== 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama ==

Robert.adlington: /* 1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator */

2026-01-25T09:13:50Z

1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator

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 == 1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator ==
+*Two main features stand out in the development of fictional technique since Defoe:
 == 2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration ==
+*Second person narration is an artificial mode that does not normally occur in natural narrative or in most texts in the history of literature before 1919. It is an extremely protean form, and its very essence is to eschew a fixed essence
 == 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction ==

Robert.adlington: Created page with "== 1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator == * == 2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration == * == 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction == * == 4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators == * == 5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability == * == 6. Unnatural Nar..."

2026-01-24T19:25:22Z

Created page with "== 1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator == * == 2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration == * == 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction == * == 4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators == * == 5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability == * == 6. Unnatural Nar..."

New page

== 1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator ==

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== 2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration ==

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== 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction ==

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== 4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators ==

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== 5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability ==

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== 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama ==

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== 7. Implied Authors, Historical Authors, and the Transparent Narrrator: Toward a New Model of the Narrative Transaction ==

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== 8. Conclusion: Voicing the Unspeakable ==

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