How Does The Author Create A Distinct Narrative Voice?

1. In what ways and to what ends do authors create a distinct narrative voice?

In the novel ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, Muriel Spark uses a chronological narrative structure, running from the 1930s to the 1950s to tell the story. Within this framework, she creates a distinct narrative voice in a number of ways. There is much debate over who the voice is. One might argue it is the consistent and overarching voice of an omniscient narrator who can relate to the plot as a whole, moving back and forth with temporal autonomy between present time and future. This corresponds to the narrator’s heavy use of prolepsis in the novel. Others may argue that much of the narration seems to be filtered through Sandy’s perception, especially as we come
This is especially evident in terms of the character of Mary throughout the novel. She not only becomes class scapegoat, evident in the character discourse, but is even victimized by the narrator all the way through, “Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame”. Here, we may come to question whether the narrative is taken over by Miss Brodie’s perception as she revels in the notion of each of her girl’s being ‘famous’ for one thing or another. The depiction of her having “merely two eyes, a nose and mouth” portrays how all she is is a face to Brodie. The idea that she was “later famous for being stupid and always to blame” suggests to the reader that this passage of narrative is perhaps Miss Brodie reflecting on Mary and what came of her later. As Peter Robert Brown comments in his journal ‘There’s Something about Mary: Narrative and Ethics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, “Spark draws readers’ attention to Mary’s victimization by ironically and satirically depicting the activity of narrating and the often dubious authority on which it rests, for the novel illustrates the ways in which institutional authority and power can produce and legitimate malevolent narratives that place limits on how individuals are interpreted”. Brown is perhaps suggesting that Spark has purposefully placed the narrative through Brodie’s eyes, as opposed to solely an omniscient reliable narrator, throughout much of the novel to depict that much of what is given to the reader can be manipulated by an authoritative and fascist character like Brodie, a novelist in herself who believed that “God was on her side whatever her course”, the result of which can “place limits” on the the categorization of