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Articles

Volume 18, Number 1 (1993)

"I am Not I," You are Not Me, We are Not Us: Addressivity and the Status of Reference in Malcolm Lowry's Hear Us O Lord

  • Peter Dickinson
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1993-01-01

Abstract

Malcolm Lowry's Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place enacts the conflict between narrative desire and linguistic representation. Gérard Genette's assumption that the reader is undefined but always implied in narrative discourse and M.M. Bakhtin's Speech Genres provide the basis for a model of addressivity responsive to the complexities of Lowry's fiction. The addressivity of the text -- the role of the receiver of a message -- signals Lowry's questioning of the relation between notions of self and other within narrative. And it forces us, as readers, to re-examine our assumptions about the stability of narrative and language as modes of self-reference. Lowry's narratives succeed because they collapse what were regarded as stable and fixed narrative posts and because they repeatedly question uniform notions of reality.