(There is also the marvelous narrator of Sarah Caudwell's books, Hilary Tamar--Hilary's gender is never provided. The excellent writing proves that gender can be disguised/avoided without confusing people unnecessarily and clumsily with plural pronouns.)
Both these unknown narrators change/adapt/grow--which is not a given with first-person but is often likely. To a degree, first-person brings the reader into the narrator's mind, and if the mind doesn't change...
(Interestingly enough, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, told entirely in first-person, is told by a character who changes incrementally but not substantially. He learns new things, so he undergoes external change. But his personality remains fairly static. When the book came out and was extremely popular, I read it, thought it was a decent read, and moved on. A friend of mine said, "By the time I finished, I wanted to be out of the boy's head." I admired the honesty, and I suspect that one reason first-person narration is USUALLY more about internal change is that readers expect it.) 
The narrator of Rebecca definitely undergoes a change--not in her personality but in her maturity. She is the stronger member of the couple, but she grows into her strength since she arrives on the manor young and inexperienced and diffident. The book is a believable tour de force. Although I thought Joan Fontaine was utterly wrong for Jane Eyre, I consider her perfect in Hitchcock's Rebecca.
The narrator of the Turn of the Screw changes but the entire point of the book is that the change could be either external OR internal. Either she started out naive but sane and creepy events ganged up on her OR she started out slightly unbalanced and became fully nuts.
In both cases, the writing delivers: both authors capture the show-not-tell force of the narrators' changes. That is, their writing skills communicates the change, not the first-person narrators saying, "Oh, yes, and then I changed."
No comments:
Post a Comment