1. The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction.
- Author
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Nielsen, Henrik Skov
- Subjects
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FIRST person narrative , *NARRATION , *FICTION writing techniques , *FREE indirect speech , *ORAL history , *POINT of view (Literature) - Abstract
The analyses and discussions in this article are all aimed at clarifying a question that most people don't even ask because the answer seems self-evident: "Who narrates in first-person narrative fiction?" The author hypothesises, that in literary fiction, as opposed to oral narrative, one cannot be certain that it is the person referred to as "I" who speaks or narrates, and therefore that there is a need to posit an impersonal voice of the narrative. This phenomenon can be observed whenever something is narrated that the "narrating-I" cannot possibly know, as happens in Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and other fictional narratives, some of which I'll examine later. The article begins with a brief review of some contemporary discussions of voice in literature. It then proceeds to use the authors proposal to examine passages of first-person fiction that seem difficult to explain without the concept of the impersonal voice. Finally, the author compares my interpretations to some alternative proposals about similar textual phenomena.
- Published
- 2004
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