we are likely to sympathise heavily with Sophie’s position. At issue here is
also the reliability of the narrator. On the whole we expect narrators to be
trustworthy, but they may seem less so when there is an obvious distance
between their ethical stance and that of the author. In general, when the
narration is in the third person we expect it to be soundly based, if biased.
When it is in the first person there is a greater sense it could be false or
exaggerated.
In fact, there are many experimental ways of playing with the reliability,
status and overtness of the narrator. For example, in the story ‘The Shape
of the Sword’, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1970) begins the
story with third person narration, and then gives the narration over to an
unnamed narrator who tells a story about himself and a character called
Vincent Moon. It is only at the end of the story that the narrator shows his
cards and reveals that he is in fact Vincent Moon, then we have to go back
through the story and reassess what he’s been telling us. So here Borges is
playing a narratorial power game with us by withholding the identity of
the narrator, and this gives a double motion to the story. Similarly, in the
story ‘Jan Godfrey’ by New Zealand writer Janet Frame (1989), the narra-
tor claims to be writing a story about Alison Hendry, and then declares she
is Alison Hendry at the end, though her identity remains ambiguous.
Sophie’s story could possibly be told by her, without any revelation until
the end that she is the director, though this would entail many adjustments
to the narration.
All the above examples involve a realist scenario, but similar techniques
could be used in less realist, more allegorical narratives. For example, the
narrator could be a higher power who is directing the action, or an inani-
mate object that is viewing the action from its own perspective. Either way
the same range of narrative techniques could be activated, and the same
dynamics of power could apply.
Calling the narratee
In any narrative the narrator is actually speaking to someone who is
known in narratology as the narratee (see Exercise 2). The narratee may
be the reader, but the narrator can also address another of the characters
in the book. Use of the second person form ‘you’ creates a particularly inti-
mate (sometimes even intimidating) relationship between narrator and
narratee. Let’s try writing Sophie’s story in the second person:
Example 5.5: Second person narration
You thought you could be idealistic and get away with it, you were
always optimistic about how things would turn out.You were goodNarrative, narratology, power 91