C H A P T E R 3
Narrative
Some narrators in fiction are known as omniscient, meaning that
they are assumed to know everything about the story they tell and
that the reader is not expected to question what they say. If a novel
begins ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,’
it would be futile for the reader to exclaim, ‘No, he didn’t!’, ‘How do
you know?’ or ‘Don’t give me that!’ The fact that we have just read
the words ‘A Novel’ on the title page rules out these questions as
invalid. We are supposed to bow to the authority of the narrator. If
he tells us that Mulligan was carrying a bowl of lather, then we
obediently collude in the illusion that he was, rather as we collude
in the illusion that a toddler is the President of the International
Monetary Fund if this yields him some momentary pleasure.
Bowing to the narrator’s authority, however, is not much of a
risk, since we are not signing on for very much. We are not really
being asked to believe that there was someone called Buck Mulligan
who carried a bowl of lather. It would be truer to say that we
are being asked to make- believe it. We know from reading the
words ‘A Novel’, or simply from knowing that this text is intended
as fiction, that the author is not trying to fool us into imagining that