Narration

This chapter describes the narrator as the primary locus with which the reader is invited to laugh in the nineteenth-century novel form. Drawing on the work of Alan Palmer and J. Hillis Miller, this chapter approaches narrators as fictional minds, arguing that the narrator’s self-characterization, through their sense of humor, is a prism of personality through which we read. First, this chapter describes the interpretive implications of intimacy fostered through the use of humor by the narrators of Thackeray’s “A Little Dinner at Timmins’s” and Gaskell’s Cranford . Then, it examines the use of humor as a source of self-characterization through ironic dual focalization in the homodiegetic narratorial voices of Dickens’ Great Expectations and Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham: Or, Adventures of a Gentleman . In relation to Pelham , this chapter compares stable or rhetorical irony with the contemporaneous concept of Romantic irony. Finally, this chapter considers how the experience of humor in heterodiegetic texts is shaped by the narrator as a framework of personality. First, in Eliot’s Middlemarch , the narrator’s personality becomes a presence with and through which we read the text. Lastly, in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers , the narrator’s humor is defined as benevolent through its shared qualities with the character of Sam Weller.