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authorial agency of narrative, The
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Herman, David
Part two of the book focuses on homodiegetic narration and includes chapters on the paradox of naive narration in Hemingway's early short story "My Old Man," the question of unreliable narration in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the ethical dimensions of interpreting Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." The chapter on Fitzgerald (105-18) is especially illuminating. By exploring an instance of narrative paralepsis-specifically, the way Nick Carraway's narration in chapter eight of the novel reflects knowledge that Nick simply could not have had-Phelan is able to reveal "the diversity of potential functions a character-narrator such as Nick can be asked to perform within the space of a single narrative" (107). The author then shows how Nick's variable functions enable the text's complicated narrative logic (114ff).
Part three contains chapters on second-person narration in Lorrie Moore's "How," D'Souza's contributions to the Pc controversies, and the functions of "the stubborn" (i.e., that which is resistant to interpretation) in Morrison's Beloved. Whereas the chapter on "How" represents a major advance in our thinking about a difficult-to-describe narrative mode, the Morrison chapter investigates what makes for interpretive difficulty itself. Moving back and forth between personal, sometimes lyrical reflections on the experience of reading Morrison's novel, and a theoretical discussion of what the author labels "standard academic interpretation" (SAI, for short), Phelan works towards a rhetorical reader-response criticism that "maintains both that the text constructs the reader and that the reader constructs the text, with the result that it does not believe that there is always a clear, sharply defined border between what is sharable and what is personal in reading and interpretation" (177). The very form of this final chapter-the way its reading of Beloved prompts us to participate in multiple audiences simultaneously and so reflect on the rich communicative possibilities of both criticism and fiction-suggests the interest and productiveness of reading Narrative as Rhetoric.
DAVID HERMAN, North Carolina State University
Copyright Novel, Inc. Fall 1996
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