Thackeray-type narrator revisited: portrayal of characters’ minds as narratorial performance in Vanity Fair

Abstract

The traditional authoritative, obtrusive narrator, also known as the Thackeray-type narrator, has been excluded from the narratological study of consciousness representations, partly because scholars have a stereotypical view that such a narrator avoids descriptions of a character’s inside view, and partly because they dislike narratorial presence in the representations of figural consciousness. Taking Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as a typical example, this paper revisits these views and reconsiders the presentation of consciousness in terms of narratorial performance of narrative authority. With attention to the degrees of the reader’s involvement, it investigates how the narrator modulates various narrative techniques (psycho-narration, free indirect thought, narrated perception) to present the minds of the worldly male characters, how each technique functions in different narrative contexts through the interaction between the narratorial voice and figural consciousness, and how the narrator’s internal evaluation is subtly embedded in the immediate representations of consciousness to create intentional ambiguity.