from narrator to reader. Zunshine’s summary of her analysis illustrates this
point:
[Some narratives with unreliable narrators] portray protagonists who fail, on
some level, to keep track of themselves as sources of their representations of
their own and other people’s minds, and, by doing so, they force the reader
into a situation in which she herself becomes unsure of the relative truth-
value of any representation contained in such a narrative. (Why 124)Not surprisingly, I want to adapt Zunshine’s work by strongly committing
to the (implied) author as the ultimate source of narrative communication. I
would then revise Zunshine’s summary statement this way:
Implied authors of narratives often employ character narrators who fail, on
some level, to keep track of themselves as sources of their representations
of their own and other people’s minds. By depicting these failures, these
implied authors typically signal to their audiences that these character nar-
rators are unreliable, though the exact nature and degree of that unreliability
will vary from case to case.The practical advantages of this adaptation become clear when we turn
to the metarepresentation in “Recitatif ”—even as Morrison’s determinate
ambiguity adds at least two additional turns of the communicative screw gov-
erning character narration. First, by withholding Twyla’s racial identity, the
implied Morrison gives us one text that simultaneously has three tellers and
three purposes. The withholding means that we must give each sentence of
Twyla’s narration and each line of dialogue from Twyla and from Roberta a
triple reading: one that assigns the content to a white speaker, a second that
assigns that content to a black speaker, and an all-encompassing third that
assigns both readings to the implied Morrison and asks what effects she cre-
ates through the juxtaposition of the first two readings.
The specific effects of the triple sourcing vary along a broad spectrum. At
one end, the implied Morrison uses the first two readings to generate substan-
tially different understandings of Twyla’s narration, differences that highlight
links between an audience’s assumption about a speaker’s race and the mean-
ing of her utterances. At the other end, the implied Morrison uses the first two
readings to show that some situations transcend race. As an example of the
first set of effects, consider Twyla’s confession about not knowing how black-
white relations were “in those days” (the 1960s) when Roberta snubbed her
after they met at the Howard Johnson’s where Twyla was working:
156 • CHAPTER 8