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The Construction of the Narrator in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Bruce Henricksen
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Abstract

Mikhail Bakhtin's concern with the dialogic nature of the fictional text and of the self serves as an important precursor to more recent theoretical work on “the problem of the subject.” Bakhtin's dialogism is an especially useful tool with which to approach the familiar problem of point of view in The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” A dialogical reading of this novel reveals a polyphony of ideological voices out of which the “I” narrator, who emerges only on the final pages of the novel, is born. Conrad's novel lays bare this function of ideology, the construction of individual subjects. Recalling Conrad's preface, we might say that this process is what the dialogically attuned reader is made to “see” or “hear.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 103 , Issue 5 , October 1988 , pp. 783 - 795
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1988

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