Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
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Steve Beaulieu
Abstract
This article considers the “narrating-I” in African American fiction, reexamining its significance for narratological and sociopolitical theorizations of literature. First-person narratives can normally be understood as autodiegetic, in which the narrators present their experiences from their own perspectives at the expense of access to the viewpoints of other characters. However, African American narratives sometimes present their readers with first-person narrators who are seemingly more omniscient. Able to slip across the boundaries that demarcate their experience from that of others, these narrators can adopt the subject positions of other characters, shifting narrative focalization in ways that would normatively be impossible. Unlike “we” narratives that rely on the first-person plural to evoke collective storytelling, these works pluralize an otherwise singular narrator into a different sort of collective multiplicity. This paper argues that this plurality and multiplicity problematize the limitations of first-person narration, and in so doing resonate with issues surrounding the sociopolitical imagining of community. Through an investigation into the innovative narrative structures of John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday, this paper thus hopes to contribute to ongoing conversations in narrative studies by reassessing its standard narrative frameworks, as well as argue for the applicability of narratology to contemporary sociopolitical thought.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
- The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
- Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
- We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
- Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
- Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
- The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
- Forum: Sacrificial narratives
- Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
- Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
- The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
- The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
- The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
- The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
- Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
- The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
- Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
- We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
- Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
- Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
- The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
- Forum: Sacrificial narratives
- Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
- Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
- The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
- The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
- The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
- The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
- Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
