“The traveler,” writes André Gide in The Counterfeiters, “having reached the top of the hill, sits down and looks about him before continuing his journey, which henceforward lies all downhill. He seeks to distinguish in the darkness, for night is falling, where the winding path he has chosen is leading him. So the undiscerning author stops a while to regain his breath, and wonders with some anxiety where his tale will take him.”
Gide then goes on to complain about his part-time narrator Edouard, who “has irritated me more than once … enraged me even.”
It is a natural reaction in the uneasy relationship between author and narrator, inevitable given the propensity of narrators to take stories away from the author. “Marcel” drove Proust out of his story, even converting Proust’s homosexual lover Agostino into the young woman Albertine. In later life, Joyce ruefully confessed that he had given Stephen a hard time; in fact, as is obvious, the exact opposite is the case. Joseph Conrad, we know, was driven up the wall by the loquacious Marlowe.
Hence readers of this story will not be surprised that I am already irritated with the narrator’s sly hints that he is me and with his clever schemes to take the story away from me.
As Michele observed when she read the story (the real Michele, four years older, four inches taller, and talking English as she always did instead of teen talk), “I totally like the leading character.”
“The Duke?”
In full seriousness, “No, the narrator.”
“He’s not me.”
“I know that.”
I warn all readers against his pretensions. Consider how long it takes him to realize that I have cast him in the God role. Does that sound like me? Could anyone with a Ph.D. be that dumb?
In terms something like that does every author complain about the narrator with whom he is stuck, does every Other Person complain about the narrator with whom He is forced to work in order to manifest His wisdom and goodness.
Or Hers.