3 - The narrator of irony

Summary

Scholars of many critical stances have discussed how the position of the narrator affects the reading, and therefore the meaning, of a novel. One role of the narrator has already been examined in his creation of ironic portraits. We have seen how his voice fades in and out of the text by means of such devices as the free indirect style, omniscient narration, first-person asides, apostrophe, and indirect parentheses to the reader. This voice, interjected at crucial points in the text, serves to illuminate and sometimes to obscure irony. If we view the narrator conventionally as the means through which we must pass to ‘reach’ the characters, then it is also through this construct of the text that irony must pass. For it is the voice of the narrator that seems to direct our reading by indicating where we should focus our attention. Summarizing various critical analyses of this process, Culler writes: ‘As the image of the narrator begins to emerge, that of an imaginary reader is also sketched. The narrative indicates what he needs to be told, how he might have reacted, what deductions or connections he is presumed to accept’ (Structuralist Poetics, p. 195). This conventional formation of a contract between a differentiated narrator and the reader constitutes the ‘voice of reading’ defined by Barthes. When this voice is inaudible or misleading, then the contract dissolves and the text becomes problematic.

The free indirect style is one means by which the voice of reading becomes nearly inaudible because of the difficulty of deciding ‘who is speaking’. This obstacle to determining the guiding voice can lead to the reader's being ironized if he identifies the voice incorrectly.