the authorial audience’s views of the reporting, interpreting, and evaluating
coincide even as the narrating filter of the character function is thick and
the focus is on the experience of one or more characters. Convergent narra-
tion will typically have strong bonding effects because of this alignment of
author, narrator, character, and audience. Convergent narration is especially
likely to occur at high points in narratives that trace a character narrator’s
growth in maturity, wisdom, or some other desirable quality or qualities.
For example, at the turning point of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final
Continent,” the character narrator reports an action of his wife, Mala, who
up until this moment has been a stranger to him, and he then interprets and
evaluates it. Mala is responding to his interaction with his former landlady,
Mrs. Croft:
Mala laughed then. Her voice was full of kindness, her eyes bright with
amusement. I had never heard her laugh before. (194–95)This passage is an instance of convergent narration because the character
narrator’s filter is thick, and because Lahiri and her audience share not only
in his interpretation and evaluation of Mala’s laughter but also in the very
positive affective and ethical undertones of the narration. In short, implied
author, narrator, and audience are all aligned in this moment that marks the
beginning of the character narrator’s love for his wife following their arranged
marriage. (For a fuller discussion, see chapter 11.)
At the right end of the spectrum I locate mask narration. In mask narra-
tion, the character narrator’s reporting function recedes and the interpreting
and evaluating functions move to the foreground as the implied author relies
on the character narrator to thematize one or more aspects of the narrative
for the audience. While the filter remains in place, it is thinner than in con-
vergent narration, and the implied author’s voice is only slightly refracted as
a result. At the same time, the author relies on the audience’s experience of
following the character narrator’s struggles and triumphs to give the thema-
tizing its particular force. Mask narration is often at work in those lines from
character narrators that get extracted from their context and attributed just to
the author. Commentators on The Great Gatsby have no compunction about
attributing the famous sentence, “So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past” to F. Scott Fitzgerald rather than to Nick
Carraway. Similarly, commentators on The Long Goodbye frequently attribute
“To say good-bye is to die a little” to Raymond Chandler as much as (or even
more than) they attribute it to Philip Marlowe. You can, I’m sure, think of
other examples.
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