The ;;unspeakable;; quality of E. M. Forster's narrative voice

[摘要] This dissertation is an examination of the complex problem of narrative voice in three novels of E. M. Forster. Much of the recent critical commentary on Forster;;s narrative voice either discusses narrative voice as an extension of character, or discusses narrative voice as a biographical and psychological extension of Forster. Despite these approaches to Forster;;s narrative voice, Forster;;s narrative voice continues to ;;irritate;; us, as it did Lionel Trilling in 1944, in its ;;refusal to be great.;; I examine Forster;;s narrative voice as an autonomous element disconnected from the trappings of characterological, biographical and psychological criticism. I discuss how the narrative voice develops a moral and philosophical view that begins with a pessimism about the possibility of human relationships in Where Angels Fear To Tread, continues with a fantasy of perfectly unified relationships in A Room With A View, and culminates in A Passage To India in which the narrative voice promises unity and continuance through an implied acceptance of metaphysical and metaphorical assumptions. The protagonists in the three novels that I discuss all have an experience which they cannot define in words. The characters;; inability to define experience parallels the narrative voice;;s detachment from the reader, and it also foreshadows the narrative voice;;s ultimate refusal to provide a definition, or an interpretation of itself. The characters;; inability to define experience makes them appear to be characters who are limited, or ;;flat;; stereotypes; and in all three cases, the protagonist requires another figure to act as an intermediary between it and the totalizing experience of ;;the other.;; This intermediary figure provides character with a circumlocutory interpretation of experience; and it therefore evokes the characters;; simultaneous desire and inability to describe the subject of its experience. This circumlocutory figure becomes a figure that exposes and exists within the implied space between character and narrative voice, and the narrative voice and the reader. When the narrative voice describes a character;;s use of a circumlocutory figure, it points to both the character;;s, and its own elision.

[发布机构] Rice University

[效力级别] Modern literature