Silas Marner (1861)

In terms of style, this opening paragraph usefully illustrates Eliot’s rhythmic, graceful sentences. Several of these contain asides or passing comments after dashes, but the sense of continuity is also evident in the constancy of subject: wandering men. Each sentence follows clearly from the previous one as the narrator guides us through a number of points about these outsiders and the attitudes adopted to them by shepherds, farmers, and other peasants. The sentences are generally long — one exceeds a hundred words — and contain several subclauses, but they are not difficult to follow. Unlike the convoluted sentences found in the late style of Henry James, for example, Eliot’s contain more progression than digression and the reader is in no real danger of losing track of them. What is apparent, however, is the presence of an all-knowing, confident, authoritative narrator. This is usually taken to be Eliot’s voice, as Jane Austen’s narrators are often taken to be the author herself, but this in no way prevents the reader from assessing the kind of narrator and the style of narrative present in the novel. Typical of realism, Eliot adopts a ‘hierarchy of discourse’, which is to say that instead of speaking in the first person as an individual with her own views amongst the views of others, she uses a third-person narrator whose opinions are authoritative, whose statements are truthful, and whose knowledge, reliability and trustworthiness are taken for granted — which cannot be said of any of the characters in the novel. In other words, the narrator sits above the rest of the figures in the novel; unlike them she is omnipresent, omniscient, and even omnipotent: the author/narrator as God. In the world of the novel, she may contradict any statement, or even thought, made by any character, but because the narrator is not one of them, none of the characters will ever pass comment on, or be aware of, her mediation of the story. Thus the narrator is located on a different plane from the characters or from the reader and author: nothing can be known of the narrator and no interaction can take place because she, or he, is just a disembodied voice. While the material is transmuted into the genre of the novel, the model used here is, broadly speaking, that of journalism and historiography, in which an authoritative voice explains events in the lives of others in a similarly unbiased and truthful way, except that, in these other forms of writing, the person speaking in the text is recognised as the author, and this is someone identifiable and accountable. However, in realist fiction, the figure of the omniscient narrator has become so familiar as a device that it does not occur to the reader to ask who the narrator is, unless the narrator is identified with the author. The narrator is both all-knowing and completely unknown.