A Girl With a Sword

Dear Reader . . .

I was just thinking about narrators in books because of something I'm reading for my fiction class. It's actually a subject that I think about pretty often when reading stories, especially after taking Dr. Hesselink's Intro to Lit Studies class when everything we read was analyzed for narrator before it was analyzed for anything else. I was thinking about those books in which the narrator speaks directly to the readers, as in Victor Hugo and A Series of Unfortunate Events (as a parody of Victorian children's books). Now I remember having a conversation awhile ago with some friends who really disliked this kind of narrator. I've always liked it when authors do this. It makes me feel more a part of the story. Does it cause too much separation between author and character? Oh, and I just remembered, L. M. Montgomery does this a lot in her Emily books. She's always saying, "I am not Emily's apologist, I am merely her biographer" in that very Victorian way of hers. It's interesting how the role of the narrator, the duty of the narrator, has evolved in literature. In Victorian and early twentieth century children's literature (like What Katy Did, oh boy) the narrator seems to be striving to teach (and Lemony Snicket does a beautiful parody of this in his Series of Unfortunate Events) but in contemporary children's literature the author seems to be trying to inhabit the child's world and trying to get on to the child's level. It seems to me that there are a lot more books written from the first person child's perspective. I think this is rather more pretentious than the narrator speaking directly to the reader, but I guess all of this leads me to the separation between author and narrator and that's something I'm not prepared to deal with right now.