Narrative Frame

The last few posts seem to really be focusing on the "moral" aspects of narration, and I wanted to go back and address something I find very interesting that has been less addressed: types of narration. Booth makes some very interesting and important claims about narration and the reader's relation to the speaker. His first proposal, that "perhaps the most overworked distinction is that of person. To say that a story told in the first or the third person will tell us nothing of importance..." (Booth, 150) is absolutely true. Writers and those writing about writing have long known this truth, that all point of view does is give the writer a certain pivot point to write from. It may be useful to think of narration in terms of plays. What "person" is a play in? Answer: for most plays this is unanswerable. But if a play is considered literature, then where would that lead us? This, I think, is Booth's point.

However, this leaves us with the question of what to do with the speaker and how we can identify him/her. Certainly all speakers/narrators differ and there are many similarities in how they differ. Booth has chosen to identify the speaker's reliability as his method of rating or qualifying various narrators. "Perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend on whether the narrator is dramatized in his own right and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author" (Booth, 151). This definition is complicated by the fact that "the author" is perhaps one of the most uncertain terms in literary theory. Does the author exist? Who is the author? Are the writer and the author the same person? But for the moment, I believe it doesn't really matter. We will pretend that the author is some being of consciousness floating around in a timeless space (thank you Doctor Who).

Anyway, what based upon these assumptions, I think it would be safe to summarize Booth's proposition as the following: what separates one narrator from another is how different the created speaker (narrator) is in his beliefs from those of the author (our being of timeless consciousness). For the moment, we will call this "reliability" or how true a narrator is to the author's own views. This is an important distinction because of its effects for the "morality of narration" later in Booth's commentary. Most notably, the question of how to identify an unreliable narrator (one who differs greatly from the author) is very impactful. Booth discusses in his "Morality of Narration" section the fictionalizing of an audience properly so that they understand when satire is being used (388-389). What he is essentially saying is that figurative language (such as Kilingsworth's irony break down) is used to distinguish the narrator's views from the author's. This is how we identify an unreliable narrator. Using Killingsworth's ideas of closing and increasing distance would allow one to identify the reliability of any given narrator. It is the success of the author in showing the reliability that Booth later claims a work should be judged on.