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Narrator/Voice in The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Question
of Consistency, Control and Perspective |
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Michael R. Molino |
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[This article was
first published in the Journal of Irish Literature, vol.20 : no.3 1991, and is here republished by kind permission] |
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The
narrator in Oscar Wilde's The Picture
of Dorian Gray holds a significant position in the novel. As what is
traditionally called an omniscient or limited omniscient narrator, he or she
acts as the primary mediator between the characters, the action, and the
setting of the novel and the reader of the novel, what Gérard Genette calls
‘focalization.’ However, the narrator is often more than just a camera lens
through which the surrounding events are recording at times. In fact, the
narrator seems to have the power to enter a character's heart and mind in
order to perceive and analyze the motivation, intent, and significance of
that character's words, thoughts, and deeds. Because of the narrator's
perspective and apparent powers of perception, the reader is often inclined
to listen with believing intensity to the words of the narrator, to give his
or her words, perspectives, and analysis credence. The narrator, then, is
freed from the restraints of consciousness and able to weave the narrative in
any way he or she sees fit. Perhaps this power is given too freely by the
reader, allowing the narrator to control the text and dictate its
interpretation. |
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Even
though the narrator has no physical presence—that is, he or she is merely a
voice, not an actual character by name in Wilde's novel—the narrator does
possess the powers and limitations of an actual character: discernment,
sensory and moral perspectives, biases, acuity, ambiguity, and powers of
interpretation and misinterpretations. The narrator, then, is an implied
consciousness that is susceptible to all the limitations of any other
consciousness. As Hugh Kenner points out in his book Joyce's Voices, the notion of the narrator occupying an objective
stance within the narrative framework is a misnomer.[1] The narrator is not an aloof,
disinterested observer of events. As the voice, or one of the voices, of the
text the narrator cannot be separated or distinguished from the narrative
itself; the narrator is an implied consciousness that, like the other
consciousnesses that occupy the text, participates in the narrative flow and
development of the text. |
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The
term implied consciousness is used
here because third person narrators are often given powers, both by authors
and by readers, that they perhaps do not deserve.[2] As a physically absent but
apparently knowledgeable observer of (and participant in) the events in the
text, the narrator has an edge over the reader, who is dependent upon him or
her for much of the story. By using the term implied consciousness in
reference to the narrator, this Virgil who acts as the reader's guide, I hope
to demonstrate that the narrator, although knowledgeable and perhaps even
trustworthy at times, cannot possibly discern and relay everything that occurs
in the action of the story, every thought, every utterance, every detail. A consciousness,
whether implied or not, is limited. The act of narrating a story is an act of
discernment. Events are necessarily described in an order, a sequence, even
if those events do not demand any particular ordering, such as in the
exposition of a story or the description of a setting. Certain details of a
character or setting are chosen while others are ignored. The implied
consciousness selects the details by which characters, settings, events,
action, words, and thoughts are described for the reader—details that may
initially appear innocuous and denotative but are, in fact, polysemous and
connotative. The words of the implied consciousness may, for instance, have
literary or allusive qualities to them that lend an extra-textual dimension
to his or her perspective, which may even be a source of credibility for some
readers. |
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The
implied consciousness must focus his or her attention constantly in order to
relay dialogue, narrate events, or describe the people, places, and things
that collectively constitute the story. Such focus is often referred to as
‘point of view,’ a valuable term when it is used to mean more than just the
perspective or grammatical person of the narrator, for the narrator as an
implied consciousness is a point of view—albeit a very significant
one—perhaps among many. |
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In
his ground-breaking book Narrative
Discourse, Gérard Genette criticizes writers who have narrowly defined
point of view and confused the difference ‘between what I call here mood and voice, a confusion between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative
perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator? — or, more simply, the question who speaks?’ (186). Genette would
later revise the question of mood to ‘where
is the focus of perception?’ (Narrative
Discourse Revisited 64).[3]
Genette also states that ‘the common and sometimes glaring confusion between
mood and voice, focalization and narration, is one thing; bringing mood and
voice together within the more complex (synthetic) idea of ‘narrative
situation’ is something else’ (Revisited
65). Genette acknowledges that this synthesis is possible but does not
undertake an extended study of any particular text to prove or disprove it. I
plan to begin with the assumption that such a synthesis is possible;
consequently, the term implied consciousness has been introduced here as the
plan to explore the connection between the ambiguity in the various narrative
situations and the story of Dorian Gray. |
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The
reader of any novel, of course, must be aware that the perspective of the
implied consciousness is just that—a perspective, which is potentially
insightful as well as potentially limited. This is not to say that the reader
possesses the power or the freedom to accept or reject the implied
consciousness out of hand, for that perspective represents in many cases the
bulk of the text. The reader is also not able to add to the narrative details
that he or she assumes are missing from the text because the text itself,
which is the object of the reader, exists only through the words of the
characters or the narrator's implied consciousness. However, the reader is
free to scrutinize the words of any character or the implied consciousness,
to interact with and interrogate the perspectives with the intention of discovering when they are reliable and when they are
not. In his book Reading (Absent)
Character, Thomas Docherty makes the following assertion regarding the
interaction among author, reader, and text: |
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Two things are often being demanded in new writing: (a) that the
author accept the human position of partial knowledge and refuse the
illusory position of godlike omniscience and omnipotence; and (b) that the
reader may assert a subjective freedom to author a different fiction, may
interpret the basic diegesis in a manner other than that ‘Suggested’ by the
writer. These demands seem to imply each other, and in their close confusion
they serve to distract attention from the real question of the position of
subjectivity or objectivity which fiction affords to writers, readers and
characters. (92) |
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Along these lines, one might ask, for instance,
is the implied consciousness biased in anyway—foregrounding a particular
character, event, or expression in favor of another? Can the implied
consciousness misinterpret, whether intentionally or not, the words,
thoughts, and deeds of the characters? Are there times when the implied
consciousness does not understand matters as clearly as he or she might? Does
the implied consciousness have a preconceived agenda that dominates his or
her point of view? Such questions enable the reader to recognize that the
implied consciousness controls the details, perspective, and flow of the
text; however, the implied consciousness cannot control the reading of the
text. If the reader recognizes these limitations, then he or she can perhaps
arrive at a reading of the text that is undoubtedly influenced by but not
entirely dictated by the implied consciousness. Such an approach to narrative
analysis proves fruitful with Wilde's The
Picture of Dorian Gray. |
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The opening lines of the novel begin simply
enough as the narrator begins the exposition of the story. Although the
narrator is the implied consciousness that describes, organizes, and presents
the story to the reader, he or she does not present an objective or
privileged perspective of the action. The details of the setting are filtered
through the narrator's consciousness, organized, evaluated, and edited before
they are relayed to the reader. In the first four paragraphs of the novel,
the reader learns the names of Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward as well
as a detailed and sensuous description of the garden and room that act as the
setting for chapters one and two. Within this exposition, however, certain
elements—what one might call themes—emerge that encourage a particular
reading of the text. The narrative perspective is not a random or objective
vision of Basil's garden but a vision that is partially subjective, having
been molded by the implied consciousness of the narrator. The first paragraph
of the novel is exclusively the perspective of the narrator, as none of the
other characters have yet entered. The narrator, here and throughout the
opening chapters, is articulate, observant, sensitive, and confident: ‘The
studio was filled with the rich odours of roses, and when the light summer
wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door
the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the
pink-flowering thorn’ (7). |
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In
the second paragraph, the narrator tells the reader what Lord Henry sees,
perhaps even what Lord Henry thinks, but the reader cannot tell with complete
assurance. Has the narrator merely described the direction Lord Henry is
looking or entered Lord Henry's mind, or has the focalization shifted to Lord
Henry? |
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From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was
lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of
a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of
a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of
birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were
stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese
effect, and making him think of those pallid jade faced painters of Tokio
who, through the medium of art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey
the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of bees shouldering
their way through the long unmown grass, circling with monotonous insistence
round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the
stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of |
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The
fact that most of the passage is one lengthy associational sentence suggests
that the narrator is relaying the thoughts of Lord Henry. The words ‘making
him think,’ which are in the third person, support this assertion. Moreover,
the tone and style of the language echoes that of the first paragraph, the
words of the narrator before Lord Henry was introduced. Lord Henry is
described in the third person, and the reader's first encounter with him
seems to be from the narrator's perspective¾observing
the location of Lord Henry, his physical position, and his behavior. The
reader also learns that Lord Henry smokes incessantly, a fact that the
narrator brings to the text, knowledge that predates the events of the story.
Also, the reader cannot know how long Lord Henry has been in Basil's house.
The words ‘now and then’ indicate a compression of time as if the narrator
were encapsulating perceptions and events that occurred over a period of
time. Finally, the words ‘making him think’ indicate that the narrator
perceives, understands, and relays the associations Lord Henry makes between
the shadows on the curtain and Japanese art. |
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Are
the perceptions and thoughts presented in the narrative exclusively those of
Lord Henry, a shift in focalization, or has the narrator chosen selective
perceptions and thoughts that he or she deems important and presented those
while ignoring others? Even if the passage entails the free indirect
discourse of Lord Henry intruding upon the narrative, the implied
consciousness of the narrator seems to have selected details and ideas that
have implications beyond that of character development and exposition.[4]
For example, the contrast between art and life—one of stasis versus motion,
artificial versus natural—is presented visually in the ‘fantastic shadows of
birds in flight [that produce J a kind of momentary Japanese effect.’ The
birds (life/motion) create an illusion on the curtain (stasis). From this
vision, Lord Henry thinks ‘of those pallid jade faced painters of Tokio who,
through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the
sense of swiftness and motion,’ which transfers the shadows into the realm of
art. (Ironically, the Japanese artists who attempt to capture the motion of
life through the stasis of their artistic medium are portrayed here, their
faces ‘pallid jade,’ as lifeless. Also, the juxtaposition here is reminiscent
of Lord Henry's penchant for paradoxical observations.) Likewise, the sound
of the bees on their frenetic odyssey through the garden contrasts with the
‘dim roar of |
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Whether
the thoughts are Lord Henry's alone, the narrator's alone, a combination of
the two in which the narrator edits and relays Lord Henry's thoughts, or the
free indirect discourse of Lord Henry is unclear, but the sense of opposition
in the passage is unmistakable. The setting that is portrayed acts as an
objective correlative for the conversation between Lord Henry and Basil
regarding art and life; it also establishes a dichotomy between that which is
in motion and that which is static, elements that are portrayed as distinct
and opposite. Both of these oppositions adumbrate the painting of Dorian Gray
(art/stasis), which is introduced in paragraph three, and its real-life
counterpart, Dorian himself, (life/motion), who enters the story at the
beginning of chapter two. |
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When
the picture of Dorian Gray (that which should remain artificial, static, art)
begins to age and reflect the moral turpitude of its human counterpart, the
normal distinction between art and life is blurred. The boundary is also
blurred with Dorian himself, who should, as a normal human being, age and
change with time. Dorian retains the human characteristic of motion, but his
beauty remains intact as if frozen in time, and the depravity of his
lifestyle is reflected only in the face of the picture, not in Dorian
himself. Thus, Dorian becomes a hybrid, a character who straddles the slash
mark between art/life, stasis/motion, artificial/natural. What is later
defined as an absolute dichotomy in the debate between Basil and Lord Henry,
which is supported by the narrative and the imagery in the opening
paragraphs, is confused throughout the rest of the novel in the character and
picture of Dorian Gray. |
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A moral
dichotomy emerges as well from the description of Basil's garden. The
garden—an idyllic, even Edenic setting—is described in particularly sensuous
details of sight, sound, and smell, and touch: the sight of laburnum
blossoms, the shadows of the birds; the sound of the bees and the city; the
scent of roses, lilacs, and pink-flowering thorns; even the tactile sensation
of the breeze. Such sensorial splendor adumbrates the New Hedonism of Lord
Henry. The garden, though, may also
be a prelapsarian setting in which Lord Henry will act as the corrupting
agent of the as yet pure Dorian Gray. In her introduction to the World's
Classics edition of the novel, Isobel Murray asserts such a Biblical
analogue: ‘But Lord Henry's influence on Dorian was prior [to that of Basil
and Sibyl Vane], and is clearly to prevail. Basil cannot protect Dorian from
Lord Henry. In Basil's garden Lord Henry acts the part of the serpent in |
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In chapters one and two, the narrator presents a
fairly balanced portrait, portraying both sides of the dichotomy with equal
clarity and appreciation—neither side is privileged over the other. Isobel
Murray's analysis is the one viable interpretation of the events in the
garden, but it is not the only one. The beautiful environment of the garden
seems the perfect setting for the New Hedonism—a place rich with exotic and
alluring sensory impressions. These sensations have their origin in natural
things—flowers, bees, sunlight, shadows, and breezes. As Donald Ericksen
points out, ‘The tone of the novel suggests approval of the New Hedonism, yet
the events, particularly the ending, suggests its condemnation’ (113). Lord
Henry might be seen as the one who introduces Dorian to the riches that are
at the disposal of all human beings, the natural sensations of the human
consciousness. He is certainly unconventional, in contrast with the ‘English’
Basil, who acts the incorruptible bastion of artistic and moral certainty,
but that does not make Lord Henry the Devil incarnate unless one reads the
text as a conflict of opposites, a morality play in which the fate of
Dorian's soul hangs in the balance between the competing influences of Lord
Henry and Basil Hallward (15). |
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Dorian is the one whose desires are extreme. Lord
Henry does not advocate blurring the boundaries between art and life, which
Dorian does: ‘I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die’ (34).
Lord Henry knows the difference between the two. In fact, Lord Henry remains
consistent in his views throughout the novel; he realizes that the two are
distinct and that the most a human can hope for is merely momentary or
temporal satisfaction. He never acts as a Mephistopheles who offers Dorian
eternal beauty. In fact, at the end of the novel when he encounters Dorian,
Lord Henry states that he is amazed that Dorian has retained his youthful
beauty all these years. Lord Henry remains willfully and playfully paradoxical
throughout. (The very fact that Lord Henry enjoys being paradoxical so much
reveals that he recognizes that the dichotomies exist. His paradoxes act as a
form of peculiar homage to those dichotomies, the conventionality he
rhetorically manipulates but cannot escape.) |
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Basil,
on the other hand, contradicts himself several times in the early chapters.
At first he tells Lord Henry that ‘every portrait that is painted with
feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter’ (11). A few minutes
later, he says the exact opposite: ‘An artist should create beautiful things,
but should put nothing of his own life into them’ (18). Later in the novel,
Basil once again changes his position on the matter: ‘Art is always more
abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tells us of form and colour—that is
all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely
than it ever reveals him’ (129). Basil seems to view art as the vehicle by
which humans can perceive the absolute, the essence behind reality. He tells
Dorian, ‘You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose
memory haunts us artists like an exquisite drama’ (128). One is tempted to
wonder if Basil is not the one inclined toward willful paradox. Though he
becomes the vehicle of redemption for Dorian in chapter thirteen, Basil is
far from clear in his own understanding of the absolute, in other words,
cannot remain consistent in his views of the absolute nature of art. The
reader, as a result, is tempted not to trust his perspective at all. |
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So
too with the narrator, who does not retain a single or balanced approach to
the story. Beginning with chapter three, for example, the narrator assumes
the voice (the tone and ironic style) of Lord Henry: |
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At |
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At last in the costume of the age, Reality entered the room in the
shape of a servant to tell the Duchess that her carriage was waiting. (50) |
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Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his
principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. (53) |
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The last of
these passages could easily be the free indirect discourse of Lord Henry, the
narrator being the vehicle through which Lord Henry's paradox is conveyed.
The first and second passages, however, are clearly focalized through the
narrator, but the tone and style of the discourse are that of Lord Henry. If
the first passage is an extended example of free indirect discourse, then the
thoughts of Lord Henry so thoroughly intrude upon the narrative as to eclipse
the implied consciousness of the narrator.[5] |
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If these are
the words of the narrator, though, they are so akin to those of Lord Henry
that one is inclined to see the narrator has having sided with Lord
Henry—perhaps not with the New Hedonism in general but certainly with the
pose of the ironist. In chapters one and two, the narrator asserts his or her
perspective and then, perhaps, Lord Henry's, but retains a distinctive tone
and style of discourse, one that the reader can identify. The reader can
recognize and distinguish the narrator's consciousness from those of other
characters. In the opening lines of chapter three, however, the narrator is
subsumed either by Lord Henry's thoughts or Lord Henry's mode of speech,
Henry's idiolect. Of course, the narrator reasserts himself, and the reader
can distinguish the narrator from the other characters, but the narrator's
illusory position of objectivity, disinterestedness, aloofness, and
omniscience is revealed when his or her consciousness overlaps with Lord
Henry's. If the narrator is so susceptible, why should one be surprised that
Dorian is as well? |
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In fact, the
overlapping of Lord Henry's consciousness and the narrator's implied
consciousness occurs many times in the chapters prior to chapter thirteen: |
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Jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of
some stranger. He had the dislike of being stared at which comes on geniuses
late in life, and never leaves the commonplace. (75) |
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There was a rather heavy bill for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet
set, that he [Dorian] had not yet had the courage to send on to his
guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that
we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities. (106) |
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The above
passages are just two examples of Lord Henry's influence upon the narrator.
They are both vintage Henry aphorisms that ironically mock, in the first,
Jim's demeanor and, in the second, the materialism of society. The narrator's
own voice, of course, reasserts itself throughout these chapters as the
narrator describes the action of Dorian and other characters, but neither the
narrator's voice nor stance is consistent. |
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In chapter
eleven, the narrator is reduced to gossip about Dorian. There is not even a
semblance of an omniscient narrator whose perspective encapsulates the
perspectives of all other characters; instead, one finds a narrator who
passes on the stories that have been spread around London regarding Dorian's
behavior: ‘It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign
sailors in a low den in the distant part of Whitechapel, and that he
consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade’
(157). Such lines are filled with bourgeois morality and prejudice. The first
words, ‘It was rumoured that,’ act as form of verisimilitude: If others think
and say so, it must be true. The fact that Dorian is rumored to associate
with ‘foreign sailors’ is a double strike against him¾the sailors being bad enough, but foreign sailors
making the offense intolerable. Dorian also has learned, so the story goes,
about the unseemly craft of thievery and money-lending. Is the narrator
adopting a discernable sociolect in order to convey the attitudes of society
to the reader, or has the narrator begun to see Dorian the way others do? If
the answer is the former, then the narrator knows matters that exist outside
the confines of the text, the gossip itself, but does not seem to know
whether that gossip is accurate or not. If the latter is true, then once
again the narrator's views have been molded by others, this time by
characters who are physically absent from the text. |
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After
conveying these rumors, the narrator again assumes the pose of Lord Henry,
but there is a difference this time: |
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Yet these whispered scandals only increased, in the eyes of many, his
strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain element of
security. Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe
anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It
feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in
its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the
possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to
be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is
irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtue cannot atone for
half-cold entrees, as Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the
subject; and there is possibly a good deal to be said for it. It should have
the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the
insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such
plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It
is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. Such, at any
rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. (158-59) |
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It is
impossible to tell the difference between the narrator's voice and Lord
Henry's in this passage, but one might wonder how thoroughly the narrator
actually believes in the words he says. The final lines of the passage could
be an ironic summation of the human condition in a society that prefers style
over substance, or it could be the rationalization of someone who is trying
to justify a thoroughly self-centered existence. The last line of the passage
indicates that the ideas are supposed to be Dorian's, but the narrator's
first person ‘I’ in the answer to the rhetorical question implies that they
are the narrator's thoughts as well. Has the narrator grappled with the moral
ramifications of Lord Henry's words and Dorian's deeds throughout the novel
but now cannot reconcile the two? The intrusion of the narrator's implied
consciousness upon the narrative itself in the form of the first person ‘I’
is quite significant. It belies the objectivity of the narrator. The narrator
is not merely conveying Dorian's ideas to the reader: the narrator, instead, is
trying to make sense of the situation just as the reader is. The narrator
reads the characters and action of the story just as the reader reads the
narrative itself. In this case, however, the narrator must tentatively posit
an interpretation of the story just as the reader does. Far from the
omniscient, guiding narrative voice of authority, here the narrator is a
reader and interpreter, but whose reading often rings hollow. |
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After this
passage, the implied consciousness of the narrator as a discernable voice
almost disappears from the text. From chapter thirteen, when Basil re-enters
the story and tries to save Dorian from further corruption, through the end
of the novel the narrator enters the text long enough to convey necessary
factual details. The narrator's words act almost exclusively as stage
directions that explain the action and details of the story, but the narrator
asserts a discernable perspective less and less as the novel progresses.
While there are moments that appear to be the free indirect discourse of
Dorian in these chapters, the willful paradox so characteristic of Lord
Henry's rhetorical pose disappears from the narrator's words. In the latter
chapters, dialogue occurs almost to the exclusion of narration—except at the
very beginning of each chapter when the narrator establishes the time and place
of the action and describes interim events—as if the narrator were merely
conveying the words of others, intruding mostly to insert descriptive tags to
the dialogue, such as: ‘murmured Dorian, with a sigh’ or ‘said a stern voice
behind him.’ |
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The narrative
voice of the last chapters is significantly different from the gossiping and
rationalizing narrative voice of chapter eleven. Both of these voices are
different from the one that echoed Lord Henry's aphoristic and ironic style
in the early chapters. All of these voices are different still from the voice
that foreshadowed the dominant conflicts of the novel in the exposition of
chapters one and two. With such an inconsistent narrator/voice, the narrative
structure of the novel is undermined. The implied consciousness of the
narrator is not an omniscient, objective perspective that unerringly
documents the words, thoughts, and deeds of the characters; rather, the
narrator is flawed and impressionable, whose words may at times be reliable,
but at others highly suspect. In fact, it seems that Dorian is not the only
consciousness ‘tempted’ by Lord Henry: the narrator is influenced greatly by
Lord Henry's paradoxical stances. Unfortunately, the narrator is not as
consistent with that rhetorical pose as Lord Henry is. When unable to
reconcile the conflicting sides of the moral is |
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Interpreting
the narrative is thus problematical for the reader, who must read the text
that much more carefully in order not to be influenced by the inconsistent
views of the narrator. Ironically, the rhetorical pose of Lord Henry, which
the narrator embraces in the middle chapters of the novel, is designed as an
authoritative stance, as Lord Henry proves repeatedly in the novel: ‘Lord
Henry began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and satisfied air, as
if he had summed up the world in a phrase’ (19). The narrator, however, is
not able to sum up the world of Dorian Gray in a phrase, and when unable
attempts to disappear from the text. The narrator is not an authoritative
voice; the narrator, like the reader, interprets the characters and action of
the story. Consequently, any reading of Wilde's novel must entail the
perspectives of the various characters as well as the varying influences upon
and fluctuating perspectives throughout the novel of the implied
consciousness of the narrator. |
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· Michael Molino is Associate Professor and Director
of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Southern Illinois
University – |
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REFERENCES |
|
Banfield,
Ann. ‘Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct and Indirect Speech.’
Foundations of Language 10 (1973): 1-39. |
|
Cohan,
Steven, and Linda M. Shire. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of
Narrative Fiction. |
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Docherty,
Thomas. Reading /Absent) Character: Toward a Theory of Characterization of
Fiction. |
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Ericksen,
Donald H. Oscar Wilde. |
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Genette,
Gérard. Narrative Discourse. |
|
–. Narrative
Discourse Revisited. |
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McHale,
Brian. ‘Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.’ PTL 3 (1978):
249-87. |
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McKay, Janet
H. Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction. |
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Pascal, Roy.
The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the
Nineteenth-Century European Novel. |
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Ross, Donald,
Jr. ‘Who's Talking? How Characters Become Narrators in Fictions.’ MLN 91
(1976): 1222-42. |
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Wilde, Oscar.
The Picture of Dorian Gray. |
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– The Picture
of Dorian Gray. Intro. Isobel Murray. |
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