{"id":275,"date":"2017-06-14T14:14:06","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T13:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=275"},"modified":"2017-08-17T13:29:38","modified_gmt":"2017-08-17T12:29:38","slug":"why-an-author-can-never-be-a-narrator","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=275","title":{"rendered":"Why an author can never be a narrator"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0My Life<\/em>, 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).<\/p>\n

The answer to this question is in any case remarkably simple. It\u00a0becomes clear if we return to the\u00a0initial distinction\u00a0I introduced on the previous page between\u00a0the 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\u00a0My Life<\/em> 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 \u201cWhen I was a young man just out of law school\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

After all, in order to tell a story \u2013 even one\u2019s own autobiography \u2013 one needs to find a voice and a\u00a0vocabulary, and one must adhere to certain narrative conventions, such as those of plot structure, character consistency\u00a0and so on. One may try to find a voice, a vocabulary and a plotline that is as true to one\u2019s self as possible, but the narrative that results\u00a0will 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 \u2018followers,\u2019 as\u00a0a personal diary entry for your eyes only, as\u00a0an email\u00a0to a close friend, a potential employer, or\u00a0your\u00a0parents, partner or offspring. You would\u00a0find that the story of the self that emerges \u2013 and thus of your \u2018self\u2019 \u2013 would differ in every case. This does not mean that any of these narratives\u00a0will necessarily be untrue, merely that they will be partial and dictated as much by the rules of the genre in which they\u00a0are written as by whatever\u00a0actual personality you believe you possessive\u00a0outside of any attempt to express that personality through narrative.<\/p>\n

The difference between an\u00a0author and a\u00a0narrator is evidently made more obvious in those cases in which the narrator\u00a0is 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 \u2018I.\u2019 Concentrating on the narrator \u2013 and trying not to let what you (think you) know about the author get in the way of that focus \u2013 should\u00a0in any case remain an important element in your analysis of any given narrative.<\/p>\n

Take\u00a0Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, for instance. Its narrator is not Mark Twain, who is its\u00a0author, 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\u2019s 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\u00a0Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, that is, and try to reach a conclusion about what it says about such topics as race and slavery, we need to concentrate on\u00a0how 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.\u00a0Whatever we think we know about what might have been Mark Twain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Return to Authors<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0My Life, we can assume that Bill Clinton is not only the author but also the narrator of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":272,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-275","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1480,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/275\/revisions\/1480"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}