H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e8 2E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which are spoken by an omnis-
cient narrator but which register attitudes that may or may not be
Forster’s own. The town of Chandrapore does not exist, so Forster
cannot have any opinions about it. He can hold views about India
in general, but what he writes in this passage may be as much for
literary effect as a reflection of them. There is rarely any simple
relation between authors and their works. Sean O’Casey’s play The
Plough and the Stars pokes merciless fun at a character called the
Covey, who spouts Marxist jargon and insists that the workers’
struggle must take precedence over national liberation. Yet O’Casey
was himself a Marxist, and believed precisely what the Covey
preaches. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concludes
with its hero producing a long, erudite argument about aesthetics,
some of which we can be fairly sure Joyce himself did not accept.
But the novel does not tell us so.
There are times when who exactly is doing the narrating in a
piece of fiction is not entirely clear. Take, for example, this passage
from Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King:
Daylight came from a narrow opening above my head; this light
was originally yellow but became gray by contact with stones. In
the opening two iron spikes were set to keep even a child from
creeping through. Examining my situation I found a small
passage cut from the granite which led downward to another
flight of stairs, which were of stone too. These were narrower
and ran to a greater depth, and soon I found them broken, with
grass springing and soil leaking out through the cracks. ‘King’, I
called, ‘King, hey, are you down there, Your Highness?’ But
nothing came from below except drafts of warm air that lifted up
the spider webs. ‘What’s the guy’s hurry?’, I thought...