Narrative Voice in Old Goriot,

Narrative Voice in Old Goriot, Manon Lescaut, And Swann's Way

In Oliver Twist, the narrator assumes the omniscient role of the one who is able to tell the story of o boy from a detached yet comprehensive position. The narrator clearly states his presence from the first Chapter by using the first person pronoun "I." He is introducing himself in the narration in order to be able to make comments and express his personal opinions regarding the various situations he is presenting in the story and the relationship between the English society in the Victorian era and some of its most unfortunate members that are taken care of by its representative institutions: the workhouse, for example. Dickens used many of his writing as a pulpit, a place for him to denounce social injustice, prejudice, and a segregated society where class mattered more than anything, cowardice and other human weaknesses which had crawled into the lives of the British subjects during the industrial era and affected many of its members.

In Oliver Twist, the narrator makes use of irony and humor every time he intends to introduce himself into the story. The personal opinions expressed in the first person alternate with the third person since the narrator resumes telling his story as a non-involved character. Dickens' use of irony is highly productive in Oliver Twist. The narrator points out the irony of every circumstance Oliver encounters in his young life, makes comments, draws conclusions and emits judgments. The dialogues of the story reveal the narrator's choice for having opted for some of their words in order to reinforce his personal opinion or merely make a suggestion related to a possible outcome.

When it comes to exposing the whole compromised foundation of the British social security system, the narration takes virulent accents. The narrator is no longer in disposition to find excuses and he eagerly points to the faults of those who should have been in charge of the health, sanity and whole being of a modern society going through tremendous changes. Between personal opinions and third person narration, there are also parables the author introduces that usually serve the purpose to increase the ironic tone and leave no doubt to the judgments he chooses to express this way. Talking about the way a modern society raised those who came into its care, the narrator introduces the story of a philosophical experiment destined to prove a theory and failed miserably through the death f its very subject of study: "Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died, four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air" (Oliver Twist, p. 5).

After having introduced himself using the first person pronoun, the narrator makes his voice heard in the rest of the story through impersonal remarks and remains omniscient by his knowledge of the characters' most intimate thoughts.

In Swann's way the narrative starts with the Prelude where the use of the first person for the narrative voice announces a story written in the format of a journal. The voice is that of young Marcel. All the pieces are in place, the narrator is even speaking of himself as a writer, but the reader will soon find that, unlike in the case of the narrator in Oliver Twist, this is not an omniscient narrator. He introduces the character of Swann as the only one of "our 'guests' [who] were practically limited to Mr. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner" (Swann's Way, p. 15). The memoir style of the novel continues in the second chapter, enforced by the highly intimate confessions the narrator makes along with the story. The famous memory trigger, the tea dipped Madeleine, brings back memories from Marcel's childhood and young adult life.

The relationship between Marcel's memories and Swann, his parent's friend, makes the passage into the second story of the novel, where Swann becomes the central character. Marcel, the narrator, introduces it by the end of Chapter 2, Combray: "And so, I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray[…] of other days besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the taste […] of a cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born" (Swann's Way, p. 256).

The second story in the novel is written in the first person as well, but the focus shifts from the narrators own feelings, thoughts and memories unto the love story he is telling. Since the story happened "around the date of my own birth" (Swann's Way, p. 267), the narrator is not telling it from his own memories or involvement, but what he has heard from his family of read in the letters they left him. The voice of the narrator surges to the surface from time to time during the passages of introspection and reflection on subjects such as that of "love": "we come to its aid[love's]; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognizing one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest" (idem, p. 271).

In this second part of the novel, the narrator appears to be telling a story after having read a book with illustrations. He makes commentaries related to the physical appearance of the characters in involved in his story as if he had been looking at their portraits: "it must be remarked that Odette's face appeared thinner and more prominent than it actually was, because her forehead and the upper part of her cheeks, a single and almost plane surface, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period" (Swann's Way, p. 271).

The narrator's voice is some other times superposed on Swann's own thoughts and feelings and although the narrator never changes, the reader is able to get inside Swann's mind with the aid of the story teller. If in Oliver Twists' case, the narrator clearly stated his mind when it came to emit judgments related to the events and people involved in his story, but remained detached from the actual story, in the case of the second novel under discussion, the narrator is deeply involved at a much more personal level. The outside factors are far less important than a character's own mind and feelings. The inclination towards introspection and philosophy is evident in Swann's Way and the literary work appears as the one of the masterpieces its place and time: France at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

In Balzac's case, his writings are the result of a very and carefully observed and well documented study of the human nature. As a writer, Balzac claims to be the mere instrument that presents the world with an image of itself: "Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and capacities. Society, far from depriving him, as Rousseau asserts, perfects and lifts him higher; but self-interest interposes and develops his evil tendecies" (Balzac, Introduction to Pere Goriot, p. xi).

The narrator in Pere Goriot, by Balzac, uses the pronoun "we," but it is different that the "I" or "we" used by Marcel, the narrator in Swann's Way. It rather resembles the style Dicken's used in his Oliver Twist, where the narrator is a substitute for the voice of the author himself. The narrator in Balzac's novel is passing judgments and making comments related to the characters and their environments, in the purest realist style. He is observing and describing as if he was watching them through a huge magnifying glass. His own opinions are less transparent than in the case of Oliver Twists' narrator. He chooses to stay detached and observe and record instead of sympathizing with one or the other.