blunt style, annoyed the suits and ties who wanted to think of the
gallery simply as a company with shareholders. There was also a
great deal of in-fighting: the board wanted more power, but was
divided amongst itself. And two of the artists who were sitting
members—and who might have been expected to back Sophie—did
not, because they felt she had not supported their work.There were
also many unspoken prejudices about dealing with a woman.This passage gives us ostensibly a bird’s eye view of the situation, and the
predicament that Sophie finds herself in. Note that it is written in the third
person, that the narrator is fairly distant, and that this accentuates the
apparent impartiality. It tells us something about Sophie’s motives, but
also gives us information about the board to which Sophie would not be
privy. So the narrator is in possession of more information than any of the
individual characters. However, it is important to note that the narrator is
not entirely distant and impartial. To some extent she expresses her own
bias, and her sympathies seem to lie with Sophie rather than the board
(I am treating the narrator as female here though the gender is ambig-
uous). She refers to the board members as ‘suits and ties’ which is
somewhat satirical because it suggests conformity, and she also says that
the board has unspoken prejudices. Of course, the narrator could have
suppressed this bias had she wanted to. She could have used the words
‘board members’ instead of ‘suits and ties’, and ‘opinions’ instead of
‘prejudices’. We see here the power of the narrator, who can manipulate
what the reader knows in relation to the characters. Particularly important
is the way these linguistic nuances affect the ideological position of the
text: to make the changes I have suggested would be to make the passage
more conservative. As it stands it is somewhat disdainful of the world of
business and the power structures which prop it up; the narrator is also
sympathetic to the problems which Sophie experiences as a woman in a
position of power. As such, we feel that she has more empathy with Sophie
than the board.
Although in the preceding example we can feel the presence of this nar-
rator, she is relatively unobtrusive. However, a narrator can be much more
of a felt presence in the narrative. Let’s look at an instance where the het-
erodiegetic narrator is obtrusive:
Example 5.2: Heterodiegetic narrator, intrusive and
metafictional (first person)
Now I’m going to tell you Sophie’s story so sit back readers, listen
and don’t interrupt. It’s difficult to know where to start, but it’s all a
case of economic irrationalism.The big guys wanted her out because88 The Writing Experiment