the child is too young and innocent to understand the event. Here the effect
of the restriction is to highlight Frankie’s naïveté in a way that Twain often
does not do with Huck. Since one of Twain’s purposes is to expose deficien-
cies of the values and actions of Mississippi shore society in the mid-1800s, he
sometimes finds it to his advantage to do what he does in the passage above:
foreground the behavior of those who live along the shore and background
Huck as perceiver. McCourt, by contrast, wants to give a thick description
of his experiences of growing up poor in Limerick, and thus always wants to
keep Frankie’s perspective front and center in his audience’s consciousness. In
this passage, McCourt effectively guides rhetorical readers’ active inferencing
about the gap between Frankie’s astute awareness that something dire is hap-
pening to his mother and his understanding of just what that dire thing is.
In the next subtype, convergent narration, the implied author uses the
character narrator as a thick filter who reports, interprets, and evaluates. The
implied author’s, the character narrator’s, and the authorial audience’s views
of the reporting, interpreting, and evaluation coincide, and the experiencing-
I (or some other character observed by the experiencing-I) is likely to be in
the foreground. Consider, for example, Jane Eyre’s description of her mar-
riage to Rochester: “I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to
live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely
blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s
life as fully as he is mine” (500). The passage presents the narrating-Jane’s
report, interpretation, and evaluation of the marriage of experiencing-Jane,
and it constitutes an affectively and ethically powerful summary precisely
because the sentiments and judgments of the implied Brontë, narrating-Jane,
and the authorial audience converge here. It’s as if Brontë wants her audience
to respond, “Narrator, you married him, and you’re both happy—and we’re
happy for both of you.”
In mask narration, the character narrator’s reporting function recedes
and the interpreting and evaluating functions move to the foreground as the
implied author uses the character narrator to thematize one or more aspects
of the narrative. As with restricted narration, the thickness of the filter can
vary, but the implied author’s voice is at most only slightly refracted through
the mask. Consider, for example, Nick Carraway’s famous interpretive and
evaluative meditations at the end of The Great Gatsby, meditations that end
with, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past” (189). Nick’s thematizing of the narrative is also the implied Fitzgerald’s
thematizing of it, one that gains power because it is rooted in Nick’s prior
experiences, observations, and reflections, all of which Fitzgerald’s audience
has shared.
220 • CHAPTER 1 1