(3) Even as unreliable and deficient narration can occur in both fiction and
nonfiction, the factual status of the narrative, as my discussion of the passages
from Didion and Bauby indicates, will influence (but not determine) the flesh-
and-blood audience’s judgments about whether the narration is unreliable or
deficient.
(4) Because the judgment of deficiency is made by the actual audience and
because the actual audience is free to judge any narration as deficient, I find
it worth distinguishing between judgments rooted in intratextual and para-
textual signals, such as the ones I make about The Year of Magical Thinking
and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and judgments rooted in extratextual
matters, especially in discrepancies between the actual audience’s values and
those of the implied author. Thus, for example, deeply religious readers are
likely to choose to judge any narration that endorses an existentialist view of
the world as deficient, but nonreligious readers are not nearly as likely to do
so. The responses of those religious readers to the existentialist narrative have
their own interest as examples of actual readers rejecting the position of the
authorial audience. But my main point here is that their judgments of defi-
ciency are based on criteria imported to rather than derived from the implied
author’s purposive design of the narrative—as I claim my judgments are. Or,
to return to The Year of Magical Thinking, many readers object to passages
in which Didion displays a lack of awareness about her class privilege. These
readers find the narration in these passages deficient not because it breaks
from Didion’s purposive design but because it conveys an ethically problem-
atic sense of entitlement.^5
(5) The case of deficient narration in nonfiction can further support the
case for distinguishing between the flesh-and-blood author and the implied
author, as a thought experiment about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly can
show. Imagine that the flesh-and-blood Bauby, when “Twenty to One” was
read back to him, recognized the deficiency in the narration but decided that
it did not rise to the level of a flaw that would be worth the extensive labor it
would require—from him and his collaborator—to revise the chapter. In this
scenario, the flesh-and-blood author would have a different view of the narra-
tion from the implied author. Indeed, the flesh-and-blood author would agree
- This point opens the door for another essay devoted to this critique of Didion’s memoir,
one that would closely examine both its grounds and its consequences. I will not go through
that door here but instead just say that I find Didion’s lack of awareness of her privilege to be a
genuine flaw in the memoir but one that does not overpower its affective, thematic, and ethical
force.
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