Friday, April 01, 2005
Fowler redux
I realized I wanted to say a bit more about The Jane Austen Book Club, specifically about the nature of the narrator.
The narration seems to be in first-person plural. That is, the narrator occasionally refers to the club as "we." Yet the narrator also seems to have information that is not generally known to the club, including big chunks of members' pasts. And the narrator does not seem to be any of the people named as members of the club. (The different sections of the book focus on, as well as the Austen novels under discussion, individual group members whose lives relate to the novels. This never seems to be the narrator.)
So does this narrator shift from one section to the other? Is it "the club" that is the narrator in some way? Was the book badly edited and copyedited? (That is, was this a goof that wasn't caught?) Or did I just miss something because I was listening rather than reading?
dmh
The narration seems to be in first-person plural. That is, the narrator occasionally refers to the club as "we." Yet the narrator also seems to have information that is not generally known to the club, including big chunks of members' pasts. And the narrator does not seem to be any of the people named as members of the club. (The different sections of the book focus on, as well as the Austen novels under discussion, individual group members whose lives relate to the novels. This never seems to be the narrator.)
So does this narrator shift from one section to the other? Is it "the club" that is the narrator in some way? Was the book badly edited and copyedited? (That is, was this a goof that wasn't caught?) Or did I just miss something because I was listening rather than reading?
dmh
