This is really a rather sinister narrative convention
I am currently reading a litfic novel from the 1950s, which I read back in the dim and distant, and having read an account of it in a recent biography did not greatly recognise it or any of the characters, so when I saw a copy in Skoob books last week, picked it up.
And it has that curious narrative convention that I have observed in other novels of the period* in that the story is filtered through a narrator who is pretty much not part of the story - and this is not a Proust or Powell 'social panorama' type of thing, this is more like '2-3 families in a country parish' or at least a similarly restricted palette.
But our narrator nonetheless happens, pretty much by chance, to be privy to the development of the plot, to be present at certain critical moments, to meet people who can fill them in on backstory, and indeed the actual actors in the story seem to be most remarkably communicative to them (I think this approached the ridiculous in Neville Shute's A Town Like Alice in which the fusty lawyer knew all sorts of intimate details about the heroine that I really do not think she was likely to have disclosed to him.)
In this one, the narrator, although a novelist, says that they are not doing this For Copy that is not how it works, or not for them, they are just sucked in to the microdramas of these (actually rather dreary) people.
And not in the least influencing events, unless it might be in some very abstruse Heisenbergian way.
One starts thinking, do these people have no lives of their own? why do they care? aren't they tempted to intervene in events? What is really going on?
(*Though I find that what I was thinking of as another example of this convention, JIM Stewart's almost exactly contemporary Use of Riches is narrated by one of the characters who is involved in the drama, but he comes over as pretty passive and the story is Not Really About Him.) This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2802424.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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