POINT OF VIEW IN PROSE FICTION: THE INTERACTION OF NARRATORS AND NARRATEES

CHARLOTTE THRALLS, Purdue University

Abstract

This study attempts to define some of the voices that constitute fictional point of view in order to show the relation between point of view and the production of literary meaning. Although narratives may employ an entire complex of voices that guide a reader's response to a text, this study focuses primarily on the voices of narrators and narratees. By emphasizing these particular voices, this study attempts to show that analyzing fictional voices as relationships rather than as separate formal elements can help us better describe narrative construction and its impact on readers' meaning making activity. The first two essays describe a theory of point of view designed to help account for the complex interaction of textual and extra-textual voices that help define a narrative. The first essay attempts to differentiate among a narrator, an implied author, and an historical author, and especially among a narratee, an implied reader, and an historical reader. Although the boundaries dividing these voices may not always be clearly marked, I attempt to show how layering a text into clusters of voices, or relationships, provides a practical way to describe some of the voices that can affect textual construction and interpretation. The second essay focuses specifically on the narrator narratee relationship. Here I posit two specific types of relationships--affinity and unresolved conflict--each of which can help determine whether a narrative focuses on character, a narrator, or the act of narration itself. Essays three and four provide detailed textual illustration of these relationships. In Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" I show how disagreement between narrator and narratee allows events in the story to be explained either supernaturally or naturally. Because this conflict is never resolved, the text refuses to authorize any single way of accounting for events, making the thematic focus of the text the problem of deciding how the story should be read. A relationship of affinity as illustrated in "Paul's Case" creates nearly the opposite effect of that in "Usher." Here agreement between narrator and narratee directs attention to the protagonist rather than to the story as narration and authorizes, at least temporarily, an approving stance toward Paul.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

American literature|Literature

COinS