Fictional narrative can be viewed as a communication between a sender and a receiver. In any narrative related by an overt speaker (or writer), "I," we can identify three sender-receiver pairs: narrator and narratee, implied author and implied reader, real author and real reader. While real author and real reader do communicate in a sense, they do so through their implied counterparts. Both the implied author/implied reader and the narrator/narratee pairs are immanent to the narrative text. The implied author and reader can be thought of as structures made up of the various perspectives of the text as a whole while the narrator and the narratee each provides one of these perspectives. By examining, within the context of narrative as communication, the roles and functions of narrator and narratee and their relationship to each other, the structures of implied author and implied reader become more clearly discernible. / The present study is an examination of the perspectives of the overt "I" narrator who tells his own story to a directly addressed "you" narratee and of how they structure the role of the implied reader. The first chapter is a survey and synthesis of the recent work of narratologists such as Genette, Bal, Chatman, and Prince on the concepts of narrator and narratee. It includes a discussion of Iser's conception of the implied reader as a textual structure made up of various perspective, including those of narrator, fictitious reader (narratee), characters and plot. In the type of self-conscious first person narration chosen for this study we see that the perspectives of narrator and narratee are the most dominant in the structure of the implied reader's role. / The following three chapters examine the narrator/narratee roles and relationships in John Barth's The Floating Opera, Albert Camus' The Fall, and Gunter Grass' Cat and Mouse. Each employs a self-conscious "I" narrator of questionable reliability who tells his story to an explicitly addressed "you." Barth's Todd Andrews, adopting the role of "author," addresses a "reader, " whose response to the fictionalized account of his past Todd carefully tries to direct by frequent interruptive commentary. For Todd, this unnamed "reader" comes to take the place of his long dead father. Camus' Jean-Baptiste Clamence, by confessing the ignominies of his past, attempts to persuade an unheard interlocutor to his vision of the world and to an answering confession of duplicity and guilt. Here there is no pretense of authorship. Clamence speaks with no apparent mediation to, and in response to, a companion who occupies the same fictional space in the here and now of the narrating situation. Grass' Pilenz, who purports to write the story of Joachim Mahlke, appears to address himself to several narratees, including the perhaps-dead Mahlke who is the subject of his story. Mahlke, described as "he" in the story, is addressed as "you" in the discourse. An examination of this unusual narrator/narratee relationship reveals that Pilenz's narration is as much his story as it is Mahlke's. / The narrator/narratee relationships in the Barth, Camus, and Grass narratives break or stretch conventions of narrating established by the traditional realistic novel, thereby forcing the reader, in his role as implied reader, to take special note of the narrating act or discourse. In each of these narratives, the discourse becomes a story in its own right, a story in which the narratee's presence is essential to the narrator's attempt to order his past. Thus, the perspective of the narratee must be recognized as pivotal in the structure of the implied reader's role in these first person narratives. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-01, Section: A, page: 0205. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74378 |
| Contributors | RIDEOUT, PHYLLIS MCCAIN., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 230 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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