Authors and narrators perform two different roles and one should never be confused with the other. But what are the grounds for saying this? Surely, when somebody famous like Bill Clinton writes an autobiography and calls it My Life, we can assume that Bill Clinton is not only the author but also the narrator of his own story. (Actually, this may not be a good example, because celebrities often do not author their own autobiographies, but employ so-called ghost-writers to pen them on their behalf. Still, the point also applies for autobiographies by literary figures, such as Martin Amis).
The answer to this question is in any case remarkably simple. It becomes clear if we return to the initial distinction I introduced on the previous page between the author as a real-life person on the one hand and the narrator as a fictional character on the other. But surely the Bill Clinton who narrates My Life is no more of a fiction than the Bill Clinton who writes and is the central protagonist of that autobiography, I hear you cry! Well, no actually. After all, the Bill Clinton who writes (assuming it is him) is a flesh-and-blood person with all that entails, whereas the Bill Clinton who speaks in the first person singular and begins his narrative with the words “When I was a young man just out of law school” (along, as it happens, with the Bill Clinton who stars in the narrative that is about to ensue) is a Bill Clinton made entirely out of words and phrases. To put it another way, whereas an author creates a narrative, a narrative creates its narrator. This makes all the difference.
After all, in order to tell a story – even one’s own autobiography – one needs to find a voice and a vocabulary, and one must adhere to certain narrative conventions, such as those of plot structure, character consistency and so on. One may try to find a voice, a vocabulary and a plotline that is as true to one’s self as possible, but the narrative that results will always be stylised in some way; it will never be a narrative that expresses exactly who you are and how you think in all situations and at every period of time in your life. Try, for instance, the following thought experiment. Imagine you were required to tell the story of your life in a variety of different formats and for a variety of different audiences: as a tweet for all your ‘followers,’ as a personal diary entry for your eyes only, as an email to a close friend, a potential employer, or your parents, partner or offspring. You would find that the story of the self that emerges – and thus of your ‘self’ – would differ in every case. This does not mean that any of these narratives will necessarily be untrue, merely that they will be partial and dictated as much by the rules of the genre in which they are written as by whatever actual personality you believe you possessive outside of any attempt to express that personality through narrative.
The difference between an author and a narrator is evidently made more obvious in those cases in which the narrator is given a different name, gender, age, and/or set of life experiences from the author. That difference, however, is just as present in those instances in which both the author and the narrator appear to share the same personal pronoun ‘I.’ Concentrating on the narrator – and trying not to let what you (think you) know about the author get in the way of that focus – should in any case remain an important element in your analysis of any given narrative.
Take Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance. Its narrator is not Mark Twain, who is its author, but Huckleberry Finn, who is also a character in the story. We might suspect (or claim to be able to prove after some research) that Huckleberry Finn shares some of Mark Twain’s views or even life experiences, and that some of these shared qualities influence the way he tells his story. This, however, still does not make Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, author and narrator, exactly the same person with exactly the same outlook. When we interpret the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that is, and try to reach a conclusion about what it says about such topics as race and slavery, we need to concentrate on how far the manner in which, say, the black slave Jim is depicted reflects the outlook, language and background of the thirteen-or-fourteen-year-old Huck. Whatever we think we know about what might have been Mark Twain’s opinions about people such as Jim is at best merely background: it can help us understand more clearly how Huck sees Jim by offering another set of opinions with which we can compare and contrast the manner in which he represents Jim in his narrative, but nothing more. The real-life historical author Mark Twain, to make the point once again, was a man of flesh and blood; his fictional narrator, Huckleberry Finn, by contrast, is composed solely of words.
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