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Reading Strether: Authorial Narration and Free Indirect Discourse in The Ambassadors
Narrative Pub Date : 2017-01-01 , DOI: 10.1353/nar.2017.0002
Daniel P. Gunn

ABSTRACT:In part because of Henry James’s own emphasis on the “rigour” of his practice, the strict limitation of The Ambassadors to Strether’s point of view has dominated critical discussions of the novel’s narrative technique. This essay argues that authorial narration plays a more prominent role in The Ambassadors than has previously been recognized and that the narrator’s efforts to read and describe Strether’s consciousness parallel Strether’s own interpretive activity. Even during instances of free indirect discourse (FID), the narrator of The Ambassadors is a consistent presence, describing Strether’s consciousness in precise, evocative detail and modeling for the reader a posture of careful and responsive attention to otherness. (In this respect, the essay’s argument about narration bears on one of the central conceptual questions in the theory of FID—that is, whether the two subjectivities [narratorial and figural] evoked by FID coexist, with the figural subjectivity contained or framed by the subjectivity of the narrator—or whether, instead, narratorial subjectivity simply disappears in FID, replaced or superseded by figural subjectivity.) Finally, The Ambassadors is a sustained exercise in reading—reading the subtle grammar of the Jamesian sentence, reading delicate shifts in subjectivity or reference, reading the suggestions and intonations in dialogue—and its subject matter is Strether’s reading of the characters around him and his own cognition and perception. The novel’s narrative technique mirrors this preoccupation with reading—and with the ethical implications of reading—by incorporating the perspective of an attentive external reader or observer into the text, in the presence of the narrator.

中文翻译:

阅读 Strether:《大使》中的作者叙述和自由间接话语

摘要:部分由于亨利·詹姆斯自己强调其实践的“严谨性”,《大使》对斯特雷特观点的严格限制主导了对小说叙事技巧的批判性讨论。这篇文章认为,作者叙述在《大使》中扮演的角色比以前认识到的更为突出,叙述者阅读和描述斯特雷特意识的努力与斯特雷特自己的解释活动平行。即使在自由间接话语 (FID) 的情况下,大使的叙述者也是始终如一的存在,以精确、令人回味的细节描述斯特雷瑟的意识,并为读者塑造了一种对他者的谨慎和敏感关注的姿态。(在这方面,
更新日期:2017-01-01
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