narration, and mask narration.^2 (I will devote the next chapter to a compre-
hensive overview of character narration that lays out my overall view of the
relations among reliable, unreliable, and deficient narration.)
In restricted narration, the implied author limits the character narrator’s
function primarily to reliable reporting and uses both the reliability and the
restriction to convey interpretations or evaluations that the character narrator
remains unaware of. In these cases, the narrating filter sometimes becomes
thin, as the implied author directs primary attention to other characters or
foregrounds the activity of the experiencing-I. Consider, for example, this pas-
sage from Huckleberry Finn: “Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his
little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand,
perfectly ca’m and deliberate, not saying a word. The racket stopped, and the
wave sucked back” (146). Twain uses Huck’s reliable reporting and minimal
interpreting to convey implicit interpretations and evaluations of Sherburn’s
imperious authority and the ultimate weakness of the lynch mob that Huck
remains oblivious to. The narrating-Huck’s filter is very thin, by which I mean
that the focus is on the reliable report rather than the reporter. Twain even
dials back Huck’s vernacular here, with only the word “ca’m” calling attention
to it. Since Twain’s primary purpose here is to set the stage for the encounter
between Sherburn and the mob from Bricksville, he does not want to call
attention to idiosyncrasies of Huck’s perspective.
But authors may also deploy restricted narration with a thick filter. They
often use this combination when they want to take advantage of a charac-
ter narrator’s naïveté to defamiliarize a situation, to guide the authorial audi-
ence to active inferencing about that situation, or to convey an aspect of it
that naïve interpreting or evaluating would either miss or render clumsily. In
the following passage from Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (which I previ-
ously cited in Living to Tell about It), the naïveté of the child narrator is fore-
grounded almost as much as the events Frankie is reporting:
Mam is moaning in the bed, her face pure white. Dad has Malachy and the
twins out of the bed and sitting on the floor by the dead fire. I run across the
street and knock on Aunt Aggie’s door till Uncle Pat Keating comes coughing
and grumbling, What’s up? What’s up?
My mother is moaning in the bed. I think she’s sick. (62)As the reliable reporting of events continues, the implied McCourt makes
clear that (a) Angela, Frankie’s mother, is having a miscarriage, and (b) Frankie
- In Living to Tell about It, I identify both restricted narration and mask narration, but I
do not place them along the spectrum I propose here.
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