Study, from a discussion around a quote from Catherine Belsey, the figure of the narrator in "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco and "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie

Résumé du document

Catherine Belsey presents her model of realist fiction as one of "inter-subjective communication, of shared understanding of a text which re-presents the world [and which] is the guarantee not only of the truth of the text but of the reader's existence as an autonomous and knowing subject in a world of knowing subjects" (Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, London and New York: Methuen, 1980: 69). Discuss the usefulness of this realist subject with the consideration of the narrator and detective figures in either or both, Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Extraits

[...] If as Catherine Belsey says: “language is not ( ) the only signifying system( ) images, gesture, social behaviour, clothes are all socially invested with meaning, are all elements of the symbolic order” ( Belsey p 45) , it is all the same the choice of the narrator to notice these or those elements of meaning, to describe some of them or to hide other ones even if some elements make sense in an intertextual way through cultural standards. This book has raised a lot of controversies because it was considered not fair for the reader that he can not guess by himself the real identity of the murderer. [...]

[...] The reader, as a subject in (and of) ideology, in the Althusser's sense ( Belsey 57) but also the subject of the novel, the narrator, through whose eyes we see the realist frame of the novel. Between the I of the narrator and the of the reader, subjects inscribed in and constructed through language ( Derrida 145-6), there is also all the “matrix of subject-position”( Belsey about Lacan) from which every subjectivity is constructed according to the range of discourses in which the concrete individual participates”. [...]

[...] The figure of the confident, both in The Name Of The Rose and The murder of Roger Ackroyd is the narrator, who appears as a double of the reader. The narrator ( the reader), ignorant, needs the knowledge of an experienced man to resolve the murder. If the narrator have simply been the detective, it would have been totally different because the detective would have tell and explained his advances to himself. This internal focus would have undermined the detective's superiority because it would have induced that maybe the assertions the detective does are only thoughts rather than definitive assertions. [...]

[...] As Sherlock Holmes, William can be very excited and fall in lethargy few minutes after, as Sherlock Holmes who used to use cocaine and morphine, Williams sometimes “stopped ( . ) to gather some herbs ( ) and ( )then chew it with an absorbed look ( ) in the moments of greatest tension” ( The Name Of The Rose p ; I thing these are sufficient clues to assert that Eco's aim was to construct William as a detective. Both narrators of The Name Of The Rose and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are unreliable narrators. [...]

[...] This is why saying that the narrator is the constructor of the sense and shapes the way the reader perceives the reality in a novel is not a way to undermine the reader's role, reduced to a blind toy manipulated by a narrator who determines all his or her deductions and hypothesis. On the contrary, the acknowledgement of the reader as a “knowing subject” need to be evaluated from another position: the reader is not a knowing subject according to the realist frame which is close to his own universe from which he could draw some conclusions, the reader is a “knowing subject” because he knows that the narrator views of the experience will come between the events and the interpretations he could draw from these. [...]