The Puppet Narrator of Vanity Fair
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My essay sheds new light on the perceived shortcomings of Thackeray's narrator in Vanity Fair. There exists, I maintain, a level of narratological sophistication for which Thackeray is not adequately praised, and his dramatised narrator – a character long misunderstood and often maligned – is the key to our renewed understanding. In addition to thoroughly canvassing the ‘puppet’ narrator's dramatic evolution, I examine the ways in which previous scholars have both rejected and misrepresented ‘Before the Curtain’, Thackeray's introduction to the complete novel – what I call the novel's ‘surprise beginning’.
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1961 ◽
Vol 15
(4)
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pp. 358-361
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