The Importance of the Narrator -- How Do the Narrator's Comments Affect the Reader's Experience?
"With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them." -- Austen, Pride and Prejudice, page
"Juxtaposed against the clipped conversation, this description announces the omniscient narrator's analytic seriousness, showing us that the novel will not be concerned simply with presenting surface appearances but will scrutinize its characters' essential qualities. To read such a complex, intimate appraisal of a character so early in a novel is jarring -- the reader is forced to pause and try to figure out what it means to describe a human being as a "mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice." . . . But we also have to slow down because of what the language is describing, because of the startling way in which the narrator presents a human being, encapsulating such a complicated person in only ten words when "three and twenty years" is insufficient to reveal his "character" to his wife. The formal qualities of the sentence are a reflection of the narrator's insistence on accurately presenting the inner nature of Mr. Bennet's character." -- Woloch, The One vs. The Many, page 50
I focused on this section of Woloch particularly because I'm interested in how different points of views in novels affect the reader's experience and comprehension -- for instance, I want to investigate this in my final paper, because both Sterne and Defoe present their novels through a first person narrative that is structured similarly to streams of consciousness. Is this more or less representative of real life than narrating through a third person? Why do authors decide to do either in the first place? What is their intent?
I also found Woloch's explanation of such a "jarring" experience for the reader (when the narrator makes such a flippant "appraisal" of a "complicated person"), although he just spent the prior pages saying how Elizabeth Bennet operates within a network of minor, "lesser" characters to promote her own worth. What exactly does it insinuate that the narrator provides us as readers with such a concise description of this character, while it doesn't elucidate others? Is our intelligence doubted? Or, does Austen just want to focus more on developing other, more important characters? The latter seems most plausible to me. Either way, I feel that the most interesting aspect of this passage was the comment on and appraisal of the reader's reaction, especially in light of Zunshine's work, and that recent study on empathy as influenced by fiction. What kind of narrative and rhetorical tricks make the human brain respond?
