Jeremy Gavron: Whose Story is it Anyway? (July 2011)

Jeremy Gavron considers the limitations and benefits of using a secondary character as a narrator in a work of fiction.  Looking at Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, among other novels, Gavron suggests that a narrator’s lack of full access to the “hero” of a story can intensify our attention to the hero and lend the narration a quality of truth-telling.