Four Characters in Search of a Narrator: Focalization and the Representation of Consciousness in Under the Volcano
Abstract
Jennifer Lawn summarizes the divergent conceptions -- those of Gérard Genette, Brian McHale, Mieke Bal, and Ann Banfield -- of the discourse boundaries between narrator and character and proposes that Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano can be classified under Genette's second classification of narration, "internal focalization," in which the narrator says only what a given character knows. The consciousness of each focalized character infects the narrative of Under the Volcano and the terrain of free indirect discourse is limited only by the reader's ability to detect its effects. The novel provides evidence that the occurrence of non-reflective consciousness in a text need not imply a personalized narrator: in the novel, there are transgressions between the narrative levels of heterodiegetic narrator and diegetic character. It is difficult to confirm whether the third-person voice of chapters vocalized through the Consul derives from the free indirect mode of the novel or whether the Consul "thinks himself" in the third-person with the distinction between reflective and non-reflective consciousness itself collapsing, thus producing dislocations in grammatical person and tense. In Under the Volcano, the narrator plays a merely functional role, as vehicle for the subjectivity of the characters.Published
1993-06-06
How to Cite
Lawn, J. (1993). Four Characters in Search of a Narrator: Focalization and the Representation of Consciousness in Under the Volcano. Studies in Canadian Literature, 18(2). Retrieved from https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/8187
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