Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration

by James Phelan

In Living to Tell about It, James Phelan takes up the challenges offered by diverse narratives including Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Ernest Hemingway's "Now I Lay Me," Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and John Edgar Wideman's "Doc's Story." Phelan's compelling readings cover important theoretical ground by introducing a valuable distinction between disclosure functions (communications from the implied author to the authorial audience) and narrator functions (communications from the character narrator to the narratee). Phelan also identifies significant types of character narration (also known as first-person narration), including restricted, suppressed, and mask narrations. In addition, Phelan proposes new understandings of such ingrained concepts of narrative theory as unreliable narration, the implied author, focalization, and lyric narrative. Utilizing what Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz have called "theory practice," a critical method that aims to combine theory and interpretation in mutually illuminating ways, Living to Tell about It also makes a major contribution to ethical theory and criticism. Phelan develops the concept of "ethical position" and explores the interactions among the ethical positions of characters, narrators, authors, and audiences. This approach emphasizes not only the close connections between narrative technique and ethics but also the important interactions between the ethical positions of the authorial audience and the flesh-and-blood reader.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

James Phelan Jr. was a nineteenth-century lawyer and politician from Tennessee. He served as a United States Congressman from Tennessee, representing the tenth district.

Reviews

[Janita Holtzhausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lucid, practical approach to narrative theory.

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything I have learned about Lolita has been against my will. Great book though!

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not only is this a brilliant articulation for rhetorical criticism (including, thankfully, a paragraph that I get to cite about why I think this particular framework for analysis is WAY better than a traditional reader response lens. I mean, honestly, Jim--yes, I know him; he was one of my professors whom I adore--this man should just write my dissertation for me since, in a single paper alone, I cited him 15 times...) Anyway.

He argues in this for a lot of things having to do with character narration, including, but not limited to, unreliable narration (he comes up with 6 types, at least), suppressed narration, serial narration, mask narration, redundant narration... all tied into the idea of literary aesthetic and ethics. Additionally, he is a completely accessible author--my mom could read this, and, assuming she were familiar with the case study text in any chapter, she'd get it. Again, he uses a mix of "literature" and "fiction" to make his points, which is more helpful than the critics who just refer to obscure fancy-pants high falutin "elite art." This book (which I admittedly had to read part of during last quarter) changed the way I read everything.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my Rhetoric and Poetics course and I enjoyed it despite the fact that I don't agree with everything that writer said. The book basically focuses the different forms of narration, the differences between reliable and unreliable narration, and the question of how narration speaks of the ethics of a story, character, or narrator. The author illustrates much of his model by examining how narration exists in certain works, such as Lolita, Angela's Ashes, The Remains of the Dead, among other works.

[Raisu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phelan is readable, and humorous, his analysis can be followed, and his theories make sense. All this, in the field of literary theory and criticism? Sign me up, please.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last chapter on lyric narratives was particularly interesting.