they couldn’t agree amongst themselves. And quite frankly they
didn’t like being bossed around by a woman. But don’t start
assuming things, or pulling precipitously at the textual strings,
because I hold them. Sophie wasn’t a naive victim, she knew what
she was about. She was as much of a game player as the rest
of them.The narrator here is still outside the story, but the passage is written in the
first person, and his presence is much more intrusive (I am treating this
narrator as male though again gender is ambiguous). The narrator is also
identifying strongly with the author by making us very aware of the
process of writing, and the fact that what we are reading is a construct or
fiction. This narratorial obtrusiveness is a feature of postmodern fiction
(though it is also present in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century
fiction). A narrator of this kind, sometimes known as the metafictional
narrator, makes us aware of the writing process and reminds us that we are
reading a fiction. This eruption of apparent authorial presence in the story
has become quite commonplace in fiction. See, for example, narratorial
intrusions in Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers , ‘Stop. Stop, stop!
Puttermesser’s biographer, stop! Disengage, please.’ (1998, p. 16). Another
example is J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003, p. 16), where the narra-
tor interrupts to say he will skip a scene, draws attention to the ‘realist
illusion’, and distinguishes the writing ofthe text as a ‘performance’ which
is distinct from the narrative itself.
Take note also of the difference in voice and language in Example 5.2:
the language is colloquial in places (‘the big guys’, ‘bossed around’) but
seems to be more aggressive. The narrator (who is much more critical of
Sophie than the previous one) is asserting his power, and trying to control
the power relationship between himself and the reader in a more direct
way than in the previous example.
The homodiegetic narrator, by contrast, is a character in the story, and
is likely to talk to us in the first person. The obvious choices for the
homodiegetic narrator would be Sophie or one of the board members,
because they are the people who are privy to the relevant information.
Let’s look at the way Sophie might talk about the situation:
Example 5.3: Homodiegetic narrator, central character
(first person)
I began to panic, I felt helpless and as if everything was stacked
against me. It seemed highly likely they would try to ditch me as
director of the gallery. Nobody on the board was supporting me,
and there was very little I could do. My success in running the galleryNarrative, narratology, power 89