The Case of the Vanishing Narratee: An Inquiry into All the King's Men
1974; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Research, Science, and Academia
ResumoWhile the narrator in All the King's Men has received much critical attention, his partner in the act of communication has been rather neglected. Yet not only are the two images of narrator and narratee (1) always dependent on each other but in Robert Penn Warren's novel the polarity is all the more marked because, contrary to common usage, the addressee is first to appear on the scene: To get there follow highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was that day went up, it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles coming at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab and if don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you'll try to jerk her back on but can't because the slab is high like a curb, But won't make it, course.... Then a few days later the boys from the Highway Department will mark the spot with a little metal square painted white and on it in black a skull and crossbones.... But if wake up in time and don't hook your wheel off the slab, you'll go whipping on into the dazzle Way off ahead of you, at the horizon where the cottonfields are blurred into the light, the slab will glitter and gleam like water, as though the road were flooded. You'll go whipping toward it, but it will always be ahead of you, that bright, flooded p ace, like a mirage. (2) And on for two pages before the narrator-agent makes his appearance. Thus it is the narratee who is first made to take the trip to Mason City, to see the hypnotic road and the changing countryside, to face destruction or regeneration through baptismal waters that may be only part of a mirage. The narratee is shocked into awareness of a dangerous future in the extra-diegetic world. But unwittingly he has been embarked on the perilous journey of the narration. And the man for whom God's mercy is implored at the end of the second paragraph, (God have mercy on the mariner), is not simply the man in the car, in age of the internal combustion engine, but the man on the road of the narration, the wedding guest suddenly turned mariner, whose precarious voyage through the text this paper proposes to retrace. The trail of the narratee is not always easy to follow. In the first place the tracks which he leaves in the text are now very broad, now rather faint. Certainly, for long stretches, pronouns may dearly reveal his presence, either the recurrent you that proclaims the allocutor, as in the example just quoted, or the occasional that includes the narrator and the receiver as in we can be quite sure that Hubert had not named the behind guy ... (p. 320) or that embraces the interlocutors and the generality of men: We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind which becomes more and more vivid for us if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality (p. 118). Sometimes a change in tenses signals that the orientation of the utterance has changed and become more narrowly focused on the addressee: It was just the shade of question, of puzzlement. But that is something. Not much, but something. It is not the left to the jaw and it does not rock them on their heels Nothing lethal, just a moment's pause. But it is an advantage. Push it (p. 237, italics added). The passage from narrative to commentary marks the rise of the narratee who is Confided in, enlightened, advised, and finally urged to act, with an imperative that introduces him directly in the text. Less obvious still is the network of rhetorical questions that riddles the narration. …
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