Narrative Interpretation In Leila Woolf, By Melba Cuddy-Brosnan

Thus, aspects of the narrator become clearer if we approach them in terms of the text’s dialogic nature: as a narrative situation with an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ engaging in a conversation. Melba Cuddy-Keane treats the text in this way, and shows how Woolf inscribed the sense of active listeners into the text. Referring to the word ‘but’, which presupposes something preceding it, she emphasises the significance in that Woolf Similarly, Leila Brosnan relates the dialogical format to the narrative form and connects the narrator both to a speaking and a writing subject:
Amongst critics, there is yet another apparent way of understanding the notion of an audience. Michèle Barrett, for instance, stresses the text’s connection with the lecture as well
Unlikely, one must also look at it from another viewpoint. The narrator’s comment about her use of the first-person pronoun may be seen as a contradiction of what has been found about Woolf being the narrator in the beginning of her essay. Because this statement comes at the end of the introduction it may refer back to the already applied use of ‘I’ and therefore negate its identity from the very beginning. This communicates Woolf’s well-known reluctance to connect the first-person pronoun to a single unit or identity. It is a refusal to subordinate her voice to the monumental patriarchal ‘I’. From this perspective the frame narrator or the extradiegetic narrator cannot be Woolf, but rather, as the narrator emphasises, she is only a textual marker for something without real
If the narrator in the beginning of the essay is Woolf or a fictive speaker, while the narrator of the story preceding the lecture is not, these must necessarily be conceived of as two narrators, or two voices, differenced by time and space, as they both use the same pronoun. The situation is made even more complex when the narrator invites the reader to call her by Mary Beton, Mary Seton, or Mary Carmichael, or whatever name she/he likes. These are all characters that are active in the story, a feature which further complicates an establishment of the quantity of narrators and their voices. Their voices are in many ways always filtering through because the narrator has made their presence explicit by naming them in relation to the ‘I’ in the beginning. Regardless of textual or narrative cues or rules, the voices of are somehow entangled with the narrator’s ‘I’. Because their names are gathered under the first-person singular ‘I’, this ‘I’ necessarily denotes multiple identities, and leads us back to a question about the identity of the narrator. Consequently, questions regarding the narrator are entwined with questions of quantity, identity, and