Compare the ways in which narrative perspectives vary in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' and 'Hawksmoor'.

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Compare the ways in which narrative perspectives vary in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ and ‘Hawksmoor’

Although there are many different perspectives taken in the two novels that shape the overall theme of each plot, comparisons can be drawn between them to show that they share a few fundamental similarities in the way that the authors present their narrative. By looking at the this presentation, it is possible to extract that the authors share common ground in the role that they take in the novel, the post-modernist way they seem to perceive their own role as a novelist and their perspectives on the theme of time in a novel. These factors combine to suggest that the novels, which have very different stories, actually are very similar in the way that they break the conventional moulds of story telling.

Without a doubt, the author plays the greatest role of all in construction of a novel but it is not often that this role is furthered by involvement in the plot, or questioned in the way that these two authors do. Both novels have aspects of this but show it in different ways: for example, in ‘Hawksmoor’, Peter Ackroyd adopts multiple narrative voices and presents himself to the reader in different ways, whereas John Fowles literally places himself in the book and also hides behind some other subtle characters. Ackroyd creates three different narrative voices that appear and continue throughout the novel – the voice of Nick Dyer in the first person, the voice of the unobtrusive narrator in the third person and finally the extraction of the narrative in the play script form. Through Dyer’s narrative, the reader gains a biased view of the events that transpire because we take on only his view and we almost experience his madness at first hand. Until we start to realise his paranoia, we believe him in his suspicions about Yorick Hays’ conspiracy and are swayed by his address of him as “the serpent Hays”. We also get many of his thoughts in italic, like “(another giddy son of a whore)”. The inward perspective that we are given with Dyer also helps us to see aspects of his character like the way he, like Charles in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, is a rebel in the society with his fascination with science and black magic, for which would both have been shunned because the only truth at the time was Christianity. The purpose of this is to show the past through the eyes of someone who lives in the past, like a diary that follows their reports on events. It also allows us to separate the past with Dyer, from the present with Hawksmoor. In the present, Ackroyd is alive to comment on the modern day detective, Hawksmoor, and to a certain extent the third person narrative leaves the readers able to make their own minds up because there is no bias. It also reminds them that they are living alongside Hawksmoor, which enforces the theme of the detective novel because they have to solve the crimes too. As a result, we get a more detached view of Hawksmoor’s character but we feel that we can trust it more because there is supposedly no bias, (although we are still influenced by Ackroyd). Finally, Ackroyd also includes an entirely neutral narrative technique where the speech is dictated by a play-like script, showing a realistic conversation in full, without any bias. These techniques are different from ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, where we are influenced by the author’s third person narrative throughout the novel but Fowles does adopt different roles as the narrator. Fowles has his role of narrating the plot but because it is a retrospective novel, we have a 20th century approach to a 19th century setting for a story. This allows Fowles many opportunities to highlight the pressures of Victorian society that the lead characters in the novel are attempting to escape. It also makes the theme clearer for the reader to understand as the characters are trying to achieve the similar kind of freedoms that we have today. This personal connection with the reader is stretched to the ‘asides’ where Fowles talks directly to the reader to explain some of the issues involved in something he has discussed and put them in a 20th century context. This is unconventional in itself but the asides are also used to communicate to the reader about Fowles’ thoughts on his role in the book and how the plot is developing. The closest Ackroyd comes to this kind of intimacy with the reader is the way he involves them in the plot by posing them indirect problems to solve and leads to follow in order to establish a detective mystery base to the novel. Fowles has another guise in the novel, when he on two occasions places himself in the novel as a character in order to create an aspect of observation to his narrative perspective. He does this by creating the mystery character of the local spy who appears at the beginning of the novel to watch Charles and Ernestina and make outsider judgements about them. This is a good technique of presenting the characters because the idea is that they are both very different from the image that they present themselves in, as we later find out. He also uses the character of the bearded, anonymous man that observes Charles on the train. These perspectives give us a unique view of the characters because Fowles puts himself in a position where he has created a character for the sake of a story but suggests that it has somehow become autonomous and he can simply observe it.

This insight into Fowles’ perception of his characters not only allows us to see the characters as more realistic but also hints at Fowles’ ideas about whether the novelist is god-like. By their narrative perspectives in the novels, both authors question whether they are all-powerful in what they can do in telling a story. By putting himself in the novel, Fowles presents himself as ‘mortal’ and no more powerful that his characters. In chapter 13, he also suggests that after the thorough characterisation of the first twelve chapters to make the characters more realistic, he is losing control of them:

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“It is only when our (novelists’) characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff-edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.”

Similarly, Ackroyd puts limits on his power as a novelist but he does not highlight any weakness in his power to control the events in the story nor does he interact directly with the reader. He has creates a conflict between reality and fiction by naming the modern day detective and his ...

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