THE NARRATOR, THE READER, AND AMBIGUITY
Thackeray's contemporaries equated Thackeray with the narrator, whom
they saw as omniscient; as a result,
they often missed the irony, read
Thackeray's satire as his actual
beliefs, and attacked him for cynicism and worse. A more careful
reading of the novel indicates that the narrator is not consistently
nor
even mainly omniscient. His character constantly shifts from
omnisicence to fallibility,
to ignorance, and even to incomprehension. His identity changes too. He
is the stage manager, introduced in "Before the Curtain"; even in this
guise, his role shifts from directing the performance, to controlling
the actions of the characters or puppets, as he calls them, to
helplessly watching them do as they wish. (So, even when Thackeray
adopts the guise of the stage manager, questions arise; is he the
creator of the story, the teller, or a hapless observer?) He
metamorphoses into critic, clown, satirist, commentator, preacher,
reporter, and participant. His situation changes, for example, from
being married to being single, from having no children to having
children. His relationship to the characters shifts from being a friend
to being a hostile judge. His attitude too undergoes breathtaking
transformations, being by turns wise, sentimental, worldly, cynical,
amused, sad, inane, smug, and pleased at showing the characters up.
This shifting in the narrator has led some readers to
accuse Thackeray of being inconsistent. This is a serious charge and
would be a major flaw in any novel. The charge implies that Thackeray
lacked the skill to create a consistent narrator, that he was too
careless to create a consistent narrator, and/or that he was too
intellectually lacking to be aware of the narrator's inconsistency
(Thomas Carlyle, for instance, questioned Thackeray's capacity for
serious thought).
The charge of inconsistency is particularly serious because of the
pervasive presence of the narrator; he is everywhere with his comments
and his reactions and even appears as a character who has met Amelia
and Dobbin. We see the characters through his eyes and know them
through his words, though Thackeray also presents myriad other voices
and views. For these reasons, the narrator is a major source of the
ambiguity--or difficulty in determining Thackeray's intention and
meaning–throughout the novel. When are the narrator's comments and
attitudes ironic? when are they to be taken literally? and when or how
often do they express Thackeray's attitudes and values?
Not everyone concedes that Thackeray is unintentionally
inconsistent. If the narrator is seen as a fictional persona, then he does not
necessarily speak for or as Thackeray. He becomes one more character,
different in kind and in function from the other characters, certainly,
but a character nonetheless. Therefore, Thackeray is free to manipulate
him to achieve particular effects at different points in the novel.
Viewing the narrator as a persona raises another set of considerations
and assessments. Are the narrator's shifts justified by achieving
special effects, or are they confusing? Do they, in other words, add to
or detract from the novel?
The views of critics differ significantly on these
issues, as the following sampling of opinions suggests:
- Are the shifts in the narrator a flaw in the
novel?
- E.D.H. Johnson attributes the shifts in the
narrator to Thackeray's
ambiguous relationship to his world. Johnson believes that
Thackeray
had difficulty in combining his satiric bent and his moral purpose, a
difficulty which resulted in confused aims:
The curious
alternations of attraction and repulsion manifest in Thackeray's
handling of Becky and Amelia characterize his attitude towards the
entire world of the novel. As a satirist, he castigates the manners and
morals of that world; as a moralist, he is more taken in by its
standards than he is presumably aware. Unlike Fielding, he was never
able artistically to harmonize his twin purposes, because again unlike
Fielding he lacked any compelling vision of forces making for unity and
poise within the social organism.
Johnson explains that the eighteenth-century Henry Fielding lived in a
stable society with
intact institutions underpinned by a robust religious faith. But in
Thackeray's society, religion was losing its authority. In Johnson's
view, one result of this loss was that love as a generalized form of
brotherhood and charity no longer held society together but existed
only as a bond connecting individuals.
-
Arnold Kettle, on the other hand, attributes
the
difficulty in determining Thackeray's intention and views to his
cowardice, "from a desire to expose illusions and yet keep them."
- Are there positive ways to view the narrator's
shifts?
- Harold Bloom calls Thackeray's narrator "that
supreme fiction" and sees
the point of view as one of the strengths of the novel. Many readers
see the narrative shifts as part of Thackeray's subtlety, a device
whereby he
indicates the difficulty, if not the impossibility of arriving at the
whole truth. If determining the truth is problematic, then making
judgments becomes an issue; in this view, the narrator's shifts
challenge our right to judge since we are all corrupted, in some way
and to some degree.
- Kathleen Tillotson believes that the narrator's
commentary serves other
purposes. It bridges past and present. Furthermore,
Without Thackeray's own voice, the
melancholy and the compassion of his attitude to Vanity Fair might
escape us. It is needed merely as relief, from a spectacle that might
otherwise be unbearably painful. And not only morally painful, but
mentally impoverished. The characters, the best as well as the worst,
are almost without ideas; the intellectual atmosphere of the novel is
provided by the commentary.
By presenting the narrator's comments and
reactions
as well as the characters' feelings and reactions, Thackeray gives the
novel a
richer, more complex, and subtle texture.
- Juliet McMaster believes that the narrator's
commentary, which she calls
alternately inane, snug, cloying, or cynical, forces the reader to
react, thereby giving the characters a kind of life and making them
feel
like autonomous beings.
You will have to decide these issues for yourself based on your reading
and understanding of the novel.
THE NARRATOR AND THE READER IN VANITY
FAIR
Just as the narrator's identity shifts, so does the reader's identity.
The narrator addresses a succession of different readers–e.g., a
supercilious clubman, a lady, women in general, "you"–to whom he
attributes specific attitudes and whom he characterizes as behaving in
certain ways. Behind these fictional readers there are the actual
readers of the novel. What do you see as the functions of the fictional
readers addressed by the narrator? And what is the relationship between
the fictional readers and the actual readers, that is, between them and
you? For example, do they create a bond between you, the actual reader,
and the narrator? or a bond between you, the actual reader, and the
characters? Are your feelings and your judgment about the characters,
their actions, and their world affected by Thackeray's use of fictional
readers? When Thackeray addresses "you," is he addressing the actual
reader, or is the "you" a fictional persona? or is the identity of
"you" sometimes the actual reader and sometimes a fictional persona?
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