Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
This paper explores the figure of the child narrator in literature and argues that they present conflicting characteristics of both reliable and unreliable narrators due to their ability to accurately report events but inability to interpret them. The document also discusses the concept of narratorial unreliability and its impact on reader-response, specifically the bonding effects between reader and character narrator. The document references works by Emma Donoghue, Harper Lee, and theories by James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning, and Greta Olsen.
What you will learn
Typology: Study notes
1 / 35
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Barcelona, 18 de juny de 2018
This paper aims to analyze the figure of the child narrator in fiction regarding the concept of narratorial unreliability and argue that child narrators present conflicting characteristics of both reliable and unreliable narrators, due to their ability to accurately report events but inability to accurately interpret them, attributable to their innocence and limited knowledge of the world. In order to support this hypothesis, this paper includes an overview of the study of the concept of unreliability—from Wayne Booth and Ansgar Nünning to Greta Olsen and James Phelan—followed by an analysis of the child narrators in the novels To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Room by Emma Donoghue, taking into account their differences in narrative structure and focalization. This paper further argues that the (un)reliability that these narrators illustrate can cause bonding effects in the reader, instead of estranging effects, according to James Phelan’s theories about bonding unreliability. Key words: unreliability, child narrator, bonding effects, Emma Donoghue, Harper Lee RESUM Aquest treball pretén analitzar la figura del narrador infantil en ficció en relació al concepte de la “no fiabilitat” i argumentar que els narradors infantils presenten característiques tant de narradors fiables com de narradors no fiables, degut a que relaten els successos amb precisió però no són capaços d’interpretar-los amb la mateixa precisió. Aquest fet es pot atribuir a la seva innocència i coneixement limitat. Per a donar suport a aquesta hipòtesi, aquest treball inclou un resum de l’estudi que s’ha fet del concepte de la “no fiabilitat”—des de Wayne Booth i Ansgar Nünning a Greta Olsen i James Phelan—tot seguit d’una anàlisi dels narradors infantils en les novel·les To Kill a Mockingbird de Harper Lee i Room d’Emma Donoghue, tenint en compte les diferències d’estructura i focalització que presenten aquestes obres. A més a més, aquest treball també argumenta que la “no fiabilitat” que caracteritzen aquests narradors pot causar efectes de familiarització en el lector/a, enlloc d’efectes de defamiliarització, segons les teories de James Phelan. Paraules clau: “no fiabilitat”, narrador infantil, efectes de familiarització, Emma Donoghue, Harper Lee
The idea for this paper came to me as I was reading Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan earlier this year for the first time. Despite having read about many young characters in fiction before, it was Briony Tallis that made me realize how much of an impact a child’s perspective can have on a story and on themselves as characters. The fact that Briony’s misinterpretation of a crucial event fuels the whole novel and the way the other characters are going to live their lives underscores the conflicting world view of a child against an adult world she cannot fully comprehend at the time. In this way, this novel made me think about the possibilities of exploring the figure of the child in fiction intended for adults, not in Children’s Literature or Young Adult fiction. What arises with children characters in adult fiction is a sharp contrast between these singular characters’ points of view and the intended adult audience’s. Thus, following this thought, I became interested in the figure of the child not only as a character but as a narrator, taking on the full telling of the story. Preferably, I wanted to look at narrations written solely in the first person, which are expected to generally give more insight into the thought processes of these children and, therefore, it is more difficult for the reader to escape the character’s perspective. Some of the Bildungsromane of the 19th^ century, such as Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens or Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, which depicted a character’s intellectual and emotional maturity from childhood into adulthood, were written in retrospective and in the first person, as the adult character/narrator looked back on his or her life. They are some of the earlier examples in which one can see how a child perceives the storyworld in a different way than adults. What readers can find in retrospective narration is the adult character remembering their thoughts and feelings as a child. Thus, in the first chapters of Jane Eyre for example, readers can distinguish between internal focalization^1 and external focalization^2 : “What a miserable little poltroon had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days! I feared to return to the nursery; I feared to go forward to the parlour; ten minutes I stood in agitated hesitation: the vehement ringing of the breakfast-room bell decided me; I must enter” (Brontë 31). This is similar to the case of The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt, a contemporary version of the classic narrative structure of the Bildungsroman. Tartt also (^1) In which the child’s view is portrayed. (^2) In which the adult character’s perspective comes into the narrative voice.
gives voice to the character’s worried thoughts as a child: “Almost every day in elementary school I heard things on the Channel 7 news that worried me. What if some bum in a dirty fatigue jacket pushed my mother onto the tracks while she was waiting for the 6 train? Or muscled her into a dark doorway and stabbed her for her pocketbook?” (61) These narrations in retrospective are similar examples to one of the novels I have chosen to analyze for this project, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee, which remains beloved classic. However, the difference is that I have chosen this novel because it only focuses on the character’s childhood, and the protagonist, Scout, who is aged 6 when the events start taking place, does not go on to tell about her life after childhood. This is a shared characteristic with the other novel I have chosen, Room (2010) by Emma Donoghue, in which, Jack, the narrator^3 , is aged 5 at the beginning of the novel. In this way, I believe that their infantile point of view can be examined more accurately in contrast with the perspective of an adult reader. I have selected these two novels together despite their temporal differences and those regarding plot. In this way, I believe my paper exemplifies how the child narrator is a figure that can be used and has been used in literature in a universal and atemporal manner. It might not be a typical narrator for adult fiction but it can be found on countless instances in literatures in English, not necessarily written in the first person. Some examples, apart from those previously mentioned include: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith, The Member of the Wedding (1946) by Carson McCullers, The Virgin Suicides (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison, or the more recent The Night Rainbow (2013) by Claire King and My Name is Leon (2016) by Kit de Waal. The novels I have chosen also share thematic content in the sense that these child narrators are characters placed in difficult situations for children to fully understand. On the one hand, Scout lives in a segregated, racist society as the daughter of a lawyer who is defending a black man against a white woman accusing him of rape. Jack, on the other hand, was born and raised in captivity, after his mother was kidnapped and raped by a man he calls Old Nick. Unable to effect change in these complicated circumstances, these children are limited to positions of observing and interpreting what they see. Because of this, this paper aims to analyze the figure of the child narrator regarding their degree of (^3) Who does not tell his story in retrospective, but simultaneously as the events occur, unlike Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.
2.1. Wayne Booth’s Initial Rhetorical Definition Wayne Booth coined the term “unreliability” in 1961 in his The Rhetoric of Fiction and his definition has been since then considered “the leading model for unreliable narration” (Olsen 93) despite having been continuously criticized, revised, and updated by many contemporary narratologists^4. It is therefore fundamental that I look at Booth’s initial definition of unreliability in order to move on to newer revisions of the term on which I will be basing this paper. In the sixth chapter of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth talks about the relations of distance between narrators, authors, readers, and other characters in stories. He then emphasizes that the “most important of these kinds of distance is that between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator” (158). In Booth’s view, if the narrator “is discovered to be untrustworthy,” then the whole effect of the work on readers changes (158). Booth’s stance on the reliable or unreliable narrator is stated on page 158: “For lack of better terms, I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not. … Unreliable narrators thus differ markedly depending on how far and in what direction they depart form their author’s norms.” Booth’s model of unreliability is communicative and rhetorical, as it illustrates a “secret” communicative process regarding the implied author and the “postulated reader” in which “the implied author sends a message through the fictional medium, which the reader then receives” (Olsen 95). Olsen summarizes Booth’s model very accurately as “a tripartite structure that consists of (1) a reader who recognizes a dichotomy between (2) the personalized narrator’s perceptions and expressions and (3) those of the implied author” (93). Hansen additionally states that although Booth “proposes a purely structural definition of what an unreliable narrator is (a matter of difference in norms), [he] is very certain of the distribution of right and wrong between the two parts” (229). Booth did not further explore it, but throughout his work, one can find mentions of terms such as “unreliable,” “fallible,” or “inconscious” being used as interchangeable (^4) However, Hansen notes that newer studies are “narrator-character studies,” as discourse narratologists have generally ignored the concept, due to the fact that “a narrator’s unreliability accentuates the character of the narrator” (230).
terms. Therefore, to a certain extent, “Booth’s mention of degrees of potential fallibility shows that he conceives of reliability and unreliability as well as fallibility and infallibility as being interrelated rather than diametrically opposed” (Olsen 96), and later narratological analyses have expanded on that. One should consider the following observation by Hansen on Booth’s model: “What Booth shows here, but only barely reflects upon, is that the reader’s determination of a narrator’s unreliability is, to a large extent, based on a comparison of the narrator-character’s behavioral patterns with his or her own understanding of behavior, and the same applies to historical facts and culturally determined beliefs. Expressed in more general terms, we can say that when the fictional story world of the text is comparable to and obeying the same (or at least some of the same) rules as the factual world, the reader relies on this frame of reference as being presupposed by the text.” (234) Hence, one can see how Booth’s dichotomized definition of unreliability focuses, as Shen explains, “on the narrator’s misreporting and ethical misevaluation” (par. 3). The problem with Booth’s model of unreliability arises with focusing mainly on these two axes: the axis of facts and the axis of values or ethics. My hypothesis on the conflict that is illustrated by the figure of child narrator does not focus on the axis of values or ethics because what arises is simply a distance between what the child sees and reports through their filter, and what the child interprets perceptively, not necessarily ethically. In this way, Phelan and Martin’s revision of Booth’s rhetorical model of unreliability^5 has proven to be key for this paper, they classify unreliability by focusing on these two axes plus the axis of knowledge and perception, which Booth did not give much attention to (Shen par. 3). 2.2. Ansgar Nünning’s Cognitivist Approach and Greta Olsen’s Revision of it Before explaining Phelan and Martin’s key revision and expansion of unreliability in detail, I want to mention Greta Olsen’s work, who proposes another broader model of unreliability which I have found useful to support my hypothesis on child narrators. Olsen took a step further in revising Booth’s rhetorical definition of unreliability, which paid (^5) See Phelan, James & Mary Patricia Martin (1999). “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day.” D. Herman (ed). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 88–109.
in comparison to those that other people hold” (236). Hansen, who also revises Booth’s and Nünning’s models to propose his own, summarizes it very simply: if a reader agrees with the narrator/author’s values or viewpoints on a specific topic, they will not be regarded as unreliable; however, if the reader’s worldviews and beliefs differ with those of the narrator, the narrator will be considered unreliable (227). This is the main reason why so many contemporary narratologists after Booth, such as Nünning, have revised and reconsidered reliability to be a “reader-dependent issue” (Hansen 227). However, as a proposal for future studies, Hansen acknowledges that the concept of unreliability is “among the most slippery” (228) in narratological studies and points out that despite Nünning’s important revision of Booth, “the rather exclusive orientation towards the reader’s responsibility does seem to overlook the fact that the phenomenon of unreliable narration is much more diverse … which is why further distinctions and conceptualizations are needed” (228). Hansen further expands his critique stating that despite the light that cognitive models are shedding on “the reader’s active role,” which “has so far been widely neglected,” he believes that “to give the reader the full responsibility is to go to the opposite extreme” (240). Hansen’s classification of unreliable narrators is based on a mix between textual elements and the knowledge readers bring into a text in view of his statement that “narrational unreliability can but does not always depend on an intentional act by a higher level authorial agency” (240). His classification, which he titles “A taxonomy for unreliable narration” (241) defines four categories: intranarrational unreliability, internarrational unreliability, intertextual unreliability, and extratextual unreliability. I am mentioning his model as it is a contemporary revision of both Booth and Nünning but I will not further explain nor explore this classification, as I haven’t used it as a base for my definition of the child narrator nor do I think that the child narrator can be positioned precisely according to Hansen’s classification. Additionally, Shen finds that this fourth type of unreliability, extratextual unreliability, which bases its existence on the knowledge that readers bring into the text, is not in coherence with the other three types because “readers with different reading strategies, conceptual frames, or in different contexts may interpret the same intranarrational or internarrational phenomena quite differently” (par. 10). Coming back to Olsen, she finds some discrepancies within Nünning’s model and proposes a new way of differentiating between unreliable narrators: either as “fallible” or
as “untrustworthy.” Olsen points out that Nünning’s reader-based model presents a paradoxical issue. Despite defending unreliability as detected by what readers bring into their reading of a text, “Nünning nonetheless wishes to clear up the confusion surrounding unreliable narrators by enumerating specific textual markers that signal them. … This is, however, problematic. For if detecting unreliability functions as a quality of individual reader response, how can stable textual signals exist to typify the phenomenon of unreliability?” (97) Hence, she states that in his model, Nünning “ignores the structural similarities between his and Booth’s models” (93), which led others like Shen to read his position on unreliability as a “shifting position” (sec. 3.2.2) between rhetorical and cognitivist approaches. So, Olsen draws attention to how readers can and will “predict whether the narrator is likely to always misreport or is prevented by circumstances from telling the tale straight” (105). She states that in order to theorize on unreliability, one must take into account the “limitations of homodiegetic” (101) and, I add, autodiegetic narrators. Their limitations are defined by the fact that “these narrators cannot have metatextual, omniscient knowledge” (101). Thus, these intratextual conditions themselves suggest the need for a revision of what the term “unreliable” entails in Booth’s initial definition of it. Olsen proposes that by contrast, narrators may not be able to “reliably report on narrative events because they are mistaken about their judgments or perceptions or are biased” (101). This distinction is, by extension, the basis for her classification of unreliable narrators as either fallible or untrustworthy. If a narrator is inclined to consciously withhold information or misreport events, considered then by Olsen to be explicitly “untrustworthy,” reader’s responses to them will be very different than to those narrators who are “prevented by circumstances” (105) to report accurately. These latter narrators are those that Olsen defines as fallible. They might “make individual mistakes or leave open informational gaps” (104) that readers can and generally will fill in. She lists the character of Huckleberry Finn as one of her examples, whose perception is flawed because he is a child with “limited education or experience” (101), not someone who is intellectually or ethically deficient (102). This mention of this specific child narrator serves to further support my hypothesis on Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Jack in Room, who are unreliable in an unconscious manner due to the fact that they are young
of the child narrator, as I define them as narrators who are unconscious of their justifiable fallibility up against an adult reader. 2.3. James Phelan’s Extension of Booth’s Rhetorical Model While Olsen took a step in Nünning’s direction to consider the position and view of the reader regarding the issue of unreliability, Phelan and Martin had also proposed their own model in 1999, extending Booth’s rhetorical model, to define up to six subtypes of (un)reliability, which have proved to be key in my definition of the child narrator regarding their degree of unreliability. As I unfortunately lack access to Phelan and Martin’s complete work^9 , I will be referring to Phelan (2007) and Phelan (2017) in this paper, where he revisits both his amplification of the subtypes of unreliability^10 and their ability to cause either estranging or bonding effects with readers. Phelan joins Olsen in critiquing the polarized definition that Booth gave to unreliability: “Reliable and unreliable narration are neither binary opposites nor single phenomena but rather broad terms and concepts that each cover a wide range of author- narrator-audience relationships in narrative” (Phelan, “Reliable” 94). This led Phelan and Martin to develop a revised rhetorical model which defines 6 subtypes of narratorial reliability and unreliability. Phelan states that: “reliable and unreliable narration are neither binary opposites nor single phenomena but rather broad terms and concepts that each cover a wide range of author-narrator- audience relationships in narrative. Furthermore, it makes sense to combine their two ranges into a single larger spectrum that runs from unreliable reporting on one end to mask narration on the other.” (“Reliable” 94) This spectrum he mentions is the gradient of reliability containing six main subtypes (three main subtypes of reliability and three main subtypes of unreliability) that I will be using to support my hypothesis on the child narrator. Since the figure of the child narrator illustrates the blurred lines between reliable and unreliable narration, I will use Phelan’s classifications of both reliable and unreliable narration to situate the fallible child narrator as fluctuating in the limits of both types of narration. Phelan notes that “the main functions of narrators are to report, to interpret, and to evaluate, and that skillful implied authors (^9) (n 5) (^10) See also Phelan, James (2005). Living to Tell about It. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
can communicate to their audiences whether their purposes and those of their narrators converge, diverge, or do some of each” (“Reliable” 95). Child narrators do report events honestly, or at least partially, but might be limited in their interpretation and evaluation of said events. Phelan also bases his classification on the author’s use of what he calls the “filter,” which introduces a “distortion of the implied author’s take on things” and conditions “the distance between implied author and narrator” (“Reliable” 96). In my readings of To Kill a Mockingbird and Room, this filter is clearly used through the child’s eyes. On the reliable side of this spectrum, Phelan includes restricted narration, convergent narration, and mask narration, from less to more reliable. In restricted narration, Phelan argues that “the narrator’s function” is “reliable reporting” and that the implied author “convey(s) interpretations that the character narrator remains unaware of” (“Reliable” 96). Further along the gradient, Phelan pinpoints convergent narration, which aligns “author, narrator, character, and audience” (“Reliable” 97), in all three functions (reporting, interpreting, and evaluating) even though the “narrating-filter of the character function is thick” (“Reliable” 96). Finally, on the furthest end of the reliable side of the spectrum, Phelan locates mask narration, in which “the character narrator’s reporting function recedes and the interpreting and evaluating functions move to the foreground” (“Reliable” 97), therefore, aligning author and narrator. On the unreliable side of this spectrum, Phelan includes misinterpreting, misevaluating, and misreporting, from less to more unreliable^11. As one can see, these three types of unreliability correspond to the three axes that have been previously mentioned: the axis of perception, the axis of ethics, and the axis of facts. First of all, Phelan states that he views “divergence between author and narrator about what happened to be more fundamental than divergences in interpretations or evaluations of what happened” (“Reliable” 98), thus positioning misreporting to the far left of the spectrum. Second, Phelan considers misevaluating and more unreliable than misinterpreting because he views “ethical deficiencies as more significant than interpretive ones” (“Reliable” 99). For example, as I will later argue, in Room, Jack reports fully but misinterprets. The narrator is at the limits between reliable and unreliable narration (^11) Note that in Living to Tell About It, Phelan defined six subtypes of unreliability which would then be added to the three subtypes of reliability; however, in revisiting the model, Phelan groups them together in three subtypes to be situated along this spectrum of distance between implied author and narrator: more distance equals more unreliability. (n 10)
the six types [of the spectrum] can function as estranging unreliability or as bonding unreliability” (“Estranging” 226). Moreover, he acknowledges the need to “look at actual narrative practice” as it has proven that “authors have also found ways to use unreliable narration to decrease distance of one or more kinds” (“Reliable, 94). In the article, “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita,” Phelan describes six subtypes of bonding unreliability. As my stance on child narrators only concerns one of these six subtypes, I will list the six subtypes but only explain in more detail the relevant one for my work: (1) “literally unreliable but metaphorically reliable”; (2) “playful comparison between implied author and narrator”; (3) “naïve defamiliarization”; (4) “sincere but misguided self-deprecation”; (5) “partial progress towards the norm”; (6) “bonding through optimistic comparison”. The type that I consider illustrates to a certain degree the bonding that takes place between the audience or readership and the figure of the child narrator is that of “naïve defamiliarization” (Phelan, “Estranging” 229). Phelan, like Olsen, uses the character- narrator Huckleberry Finn as an example to illustrate how a child fails to interpret certain events accurately due to their naïveté (“Estranging” 229). This type of bonding unreliability therefore works along the axis of perceptual knowledge and that of facts. So, while a child’s perspective might defamiliarize certain events for the generic adult reader, their age and lack of knowledge allows for the “perceptual distance” (Phelan, “Estranging” 229) between them and the authorial audience to be reduced. An “informational gap” is created (Olsen 104) and the adult reader can fill it in with their broader perceptual knowledge of the world. In this overview of the study of narratorial unreliability I have explained in detail Phelan’s and Olsen’s theories on which I base my initial hypothesis on the figure of the child narrator. I therefore further argue that the child narrator, which is both reliable and unreliable at the same time, mainly regarding the axis of facts and the axis of perception, can have bonding effects, according to Phelan’s theory about bonding unreliability. I hope my readings of To Kill a Mockingbird and Room serve to illustrate my hypothesis on these child narrators seeing where I’ve located them on Phelan’s spectrum of (un)reliability, and also to show why they can also be defined as fallible narrators due to the fact that they fully report events accurately in their view but misinterpret them due to unconscious external circumstances.
3.1 Differences in Narrative Focalization Although these two novels share certain characteristics regarding the narrators’ characteristics, as I explain in the introduction to this paper, they differ to an extent in textual circumstances regarding point of view and focalization. On the one hand, To Kill a Mockingbird is written from the point of view of an adult woman, Jean Louise Finch (nicknamed “Scout” in childhood), who is looking back on her childhood, revisiting events that took place in the past and, therefore, channeling the perspective and thoughts she had when she was a child. Similar to the ways in which the Bildungsromane of the 19 th^ century were written, tracing the intellectual and emotional maturity of young characters into adulthood, To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel in which, as is also the case of Room, our narrator as a child “cannot help but function as a set of lenses through which the audience perceives the story world” (Phelan “Why” 57), as I’ll argue in this section. On the other hand, Room is written from the point of view of a 5-year-old child and the events seem to take place simultaneously as they are being narrated. The “telling of events” does not “occur after their occurrence” (Phelan “Reliable” 90), which corresponds to the common default structure in many narratives. There is no complex structure of focalization in this case, as it isn’t a case of a narrative told in retrospective, like To Kill a Mockingbird. Before analyzing each of the narrators in detail I want to note the approach to focalization that I have used for this paper. I will be using the terms point of view, perspective, and focalization interchangeably, since Genette himself replaced the term perspective with the synonym focalization^12 but I will distance myself from his classification of the different types of focalization, which has been critiqued, revised, and reformulated since then, and will use Edmiston’s revision of it in the context of first person narrative^13 (Niederhoff, par. 22, par. 24), relevant to this paper. Genette proposes a triple model including: zero or non-focalization, which, as Niederhoff explains, redefines the concept of omniscience (par. 22); internal focalization, which includes the perspective of one character; and external focalization, which further restricts this (^12) See Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Basil Blackwell, 1980. (^13) See Edmiston, William F. Hindsight and Insight: Focalization in Four Eighteenth-Century French Novels. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991.
3.2 Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) In To Kill a Mockingbird, the audience can difference between a present and former self (Phelan “Why” 61) of the homodiegetic narrator, which work as the narrating-I and experiencing-I in the novel, through this use of external and internal focalization that Edmiston refers to. Phelan states that this use of the narrator as a focalizer, internal and external in this case, “allows us to account more satisfactorily for the complex dynamics of narration, enabling us to recognize the role that narrators play in influencing audience’s vision of the story world” (“Why” 63). In this novel, the narrating-I, which I place on the reliable side of Phelan’s spectrum, is Jean Louise Finch who is looking back on the childhood she had in Maycomb, a fictional Southern town, surrounded by her family: Atticus Finch, her father, and Jem, her older brother. The experiencing-I, who I consider to be between the reliable and unreliable limits of Phelan’s spectrum, is the child narrator of the story, Scout Finch, whose perceptions are used by Lee to tell the story events to the audience of readers “when enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them” (Lee 3). Scout fully reports but fails to accurately interpret certain events by herself. Therefore, as Shackelford explains, the novel is “focused on the older Scout’s perceptions of her growing-up years” (108). There are many instances in the novel in which the author draws attention to this distinction, and readers can distinguish between these two Is. For example, when the narrator reminisces about the time spent with Charles Barker Harris, nicknamed Dill, the siblings’ summer neighbor who is close in age to Scout. The narrator expresses how “summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longings we sometimes felt each other feel. With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable. I stayed miserable for two days” (154). In this short passage readers can both identify the adult voice remembering past feelings which seem clearly exaggerated because they are expressed through the child’s point of view at that time. When the author writes “without him, life was unbearable” and talks about “the longings we sometimes felt,” the readers can identify the use of internal focalization, in which the narrative voice is that of Scout as a young girl, and distinguish it from the adult narrative voice who is remembering these past episodes. In the following passage one can see another example of Scout’s exaggerated thoughts and, therefore, misinterpretations of certain events:
“His curtness stung me. The comb was midway in its journey, and I banged it down. For no reason I felt myself beginning to cry, but I could never stop. This was not my father. My father never thought these thoughts. My father never spoke so. Aunt Alexandra had put him up to this, somehow. Through my tears I saw Jem standing in a similar pool of isolation, his head cocked to one side.” (178) The wording of “this was not my father”, “my father never thought these thoughts”, and “my father never spoke so”, illustrates Scout’s feelings as a child, and the experiencing-I reports what she felt at the time. However, these are not reliable interpretations. Scout’s image of the idealized Atticus in her innocent eyes is broken during moments such as the one illustrated in the passage above. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Atticus “never spoke so” or “never thought these thoughts.” Another example in which this distinction between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I is made clear regards Scout’s relationship to the character of Calpurnia, the Finch’s black housekeeper and motherly figure to Jem and Scout. After seeing her interact with others at Church, the narrator remembers how the fact “that Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages” (167). These are adult realizations. The moment in which these thoughts “dawn” on her marks the shift from internal focalization, in which the child is unaware, to external focalization, in which Jean Louise acknowledges that this thought had escaped her in childhood. Because the story is told through Scout’s perceptions of past events, while she was growing up as a child, the narration is inescapably “focused on the world of Maycomb which she must inevitably enter as she matures” (Shackelford 108). Scout’s relationship to other female characters in the novel further provides readers with other instances in which they can identify the distinction between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I. Atticus’ sister, Aunt Alexandra, who comes to stay with the family for an undetermined period of time, aiming to somehow impose “femininity” on the young girl (“We decided that it would be best for you to have some feminine influence. It won’t be many years, Jean Louise, before you become interested in clothes and boys—” [Lee 170]), is a complete mystery to Scout. She recalls that “Aunt Alexandra fitted into the world of Maycomb like a hand into a glove, but never into the world of Jem and me. I so often wondered how she could be Atticus’s and Uncle Jack’s sister that I revived half-remembered tales of changelings and mandrake roots that Jem
