Perhaps I have been too hard on the narrator. I would not have you think that I condemn him. On the contrary, I am rather fond of him. After all, he does represent me a good deal of the time. He is, you might say, my sacrament. Like all sacraments, he both represents me and does not represent me. I am moderately satisfied with him in this regard, but he is often such an inadequate sacrament. However, what can an author do?
In any event, you must not let him persuade you that this story to which he obtusely attaches a premature happy ending is a story about a story about a story. O’Brien, Fowles, Gide, Twain all tell a story about storytelling, they write a novel about a novelist writing a novel. The narrator adds that he is writing a novel about a novel about how God writes the novels which are our lives. He thinks that he has described something very complex. Actually the matter is much more complex than he imagines. Listen to Aldous Huxley, long before Derrida and the deconstructionists, as he describes the reflections of a novelist about whom he is writing a novel:
“Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations which may be interesting at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make variations on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second and so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which there is another Quaker holding another box of oats on which etc etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction times.”
As my narrator knows well, that might be theoretically interesting, but no one would read it. My narrator’s fictional publishers, who may or may not correspond to real characters, would quite properly reject such a novel.
Yet to be consistent the narrator ought to acknowledge that he is the creation of the author who also has created, through the narrator, the God whom the narrator pretends to describe by putting himself in a Godlike position. Thus there is necessarily at least a story about a story about a story about a story.
And what if I who intrude with these wise observations am also the narrator created by another author?
Does it go on to infinity as Huxley suggests?
Or only to Infinity, where in the words of Harry Truman, the buck—in this case responsibility for the story (or Story)—stops.