Even when the teller of the tale is the omniscient, nameless narrator, not one of the characters in the story, that narrator is a character of sorts--though we usually take his or her words as an act of faith without paying much attention to the genderless, ageless, faceless messenger. We enter their made-up worlds without even saying hello--and vice versa. It's a literary convention, an agreement between writer and reader, to pretend that this imagined world is real and comes down from on high.
Just after writing my last post--about the three men in Margaret Drabble's book and how they bored me--the narrator mercifully closed that part and made a comment to the reader explaining why she'd been shining a more restrained light on Ivor. This is bloody brilliant, as the British would say:
"And, as we have said, it is not a good idea to look too closely at Ivor. He wouldn't like it, and we do not have the right to get too close to him. We have no permitted access to the inwardness of him. We know a lot about him, and we can describe his public behaviour, which is polite, circumspect, considerate. We can describe his public and even some of his more private actions, such as his newfound church-going, and the lipstick he tried on as a boy. But we can't get too close....
Fran Stubbs doesn't mind our looking into her head, indeed she insists that we do. She's keen on the confessional mode, not necessarily with other people, but with herself. Ivor is not."
I love this playful, skilled narrator now just as much as I love Fran!
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