He also records his own personal dilemma - his wife has left him and his son wants him to 1For the best defense of authorial “telling,” see Wayne C. As his research progresses he records his findings on tape. Ward, confined to a wheel chair by a painful and crippling bone disease, finds therapy in recreating the lives of his dead grandparents from letters and papers found in their house in Grass Valley, California, where Ward himself grew up. Stegner accomplishes this tour de force by creating in Lyman Ward a fictional narrator who is himself so believable that the reader comes to accept whatever conventions he dictates. My purpose in this paper is to show how the narrative voice presides over and controls the novel, engaging in commentary which enriches rather than intrudes, and engaging in manipulative strategies without apparent loss of credibility.
Like Nabokov’s “editor” in Pale Fire he molds his source material into his own creation, but while Nabokov’s mode is satiric, Stegner paradoxically achieves an effect of solid realism. Earlier novelists, from Defoe to Hardy, have been scored for such inartistic practices and then forgiven on the ground of living before the coming of enlightenment.1 Yet in Angle of Repose the narrator is both an old-fashioned commentator and a contemporary manipulator of the fiction. Ever since Henry James expressed a preference for consistency in point of view, or more accurately ever since theorists codified James’s remarks into rules for fiction, it has been not only unfashionable but almost unthinkable for the teller of a tale to “intrude” upon the narrative to make comments. P E T E R S O N In Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner uses a narrative technique that is both older than Fielding and newer than Nabokov. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ĭalifornia State University, Long Beach Narrative Voice in Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose A U D R E Y C.
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