![]() ![]() He other tool available to authors lacking a trusted guide is corroboration. These facts all conspire to create a verisimilitude that belies the extraordinariness of the magical element presented (namely, the writer’s wife turning into a porcelain doll), thereby lending credence to the narrator’s preposterous claims. These meta-fictive elements all serve to affirm the authority of the narration by cloaking the fictive nature of the work in an illusory sheath of fact. Tolstoy packs a great deal of verisimilitude into these two lines of fiction: identification of what follows as a letter a precise place in time positioned in parallel to a real event and a real object with its own history the fact that said object is literary, a book penned by the same writer as the subsequent letter the inclusion of a second “real character” who initially started the letter and the fact that the letters are said to be handwritten. The first few lines are in his wife’s handwriting, the rest in his own.” The story opens with an editorial preface to the letter, as if introducing an archival collection of historical documents: “A letter written six months after his marriage by Tolstoy to his wife’s younger sister, the Natasha of War and Peace. Readers have every reason not to trust this voice, requiring the author to give good reasons to accept the spokesperson’s telling of events. Onsider Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Porcelain Doll,” written in the first person, and what’s more, in the form of a letter – perhaps one of the most biased and unreliable story structures available. As such, unreliable narrators in magical realism are far and few between. And while the reader of a magical realist work, its characters and even its narrator may dance between doubt and belief throughout the telling of a magical realist tale, the fact remains that the magic is ultimately real and the characters (or readers at least) must contend with it. Less reliable narrators – the distant observer of the third person removed POV, or the most unreliable of all, first person POV – tend to elicit readers’ suspicions more than their trust, making any introduction of a magical element suspect to immediate and extensive doubt. The only ones able to make any association between Beloved’s emergence from the water and Sethe’s water breaking are the third-person omniscient “God-voice” of the narrator and the reader, making the reader solely complicit with the narrator in full awareness of the presence of magic. Instantly, Sethe’s water breaks, although she isn’t pregnant. ![]() Only after Morrison has implicated the reader in Beloved’s material reality does she bring the primary point-of-view characters Sethe, Denver and Paul D. Sopping wet and breathing shallow, she spent those hours trying to negotiate the weight of her eyelids. Everything hurt but her lungs most of all. All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. Arguably the most reliable narrative voice in fiction is the third-person omniscient narrator, such as that of Toni Morrison’s classic magical realist novel, Beloved.Ī fully dressed woman walked out of the water. Who is telling this story? Why should the reader trust this voice? Establishing the authority of your narrator allows the reader to trust the emotional truth of the story, even if certain elements defy belief.Ī reliable narrator is a trusted guide through a familiar world made unfamiliar by the presence of magic. Achieving that acceptance of the impossible, that willing suspension of disbelief in magic, is in large part a matter of point of view. Otherwise, it’s too easy for readers to disassociate from the characters and events, making the piece fail to emotionally resonate. ![]() As a form of realism, magical realism depends for its effectiveness on readers’ acceptance of the story’s magical elements as real.
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