Chapter Narration of Barchester Towers - Study Guide by Anthony Trollope

Narration

While it has been argued by many that the sort of intrusive narrator to be found in Barchester Towers, although characteristic of many Victorian novels, is artistically inferior to other forms of narration where the author "shows" rather than "tells" the story, it can also be argued with much success that in this case the narrative technique enriches rather than detracts from the quality of the book, allowing as it does for the defamiliarisation of stereotypes and for the encouragement by the narrator for the reader to adopt a less preconceived set of opinions in the face of these types. Trollope also uses his narrator to disrupt conventional uses of suspense by building it up and then taking it away by the use of narrative revelations that are as unexpected as the more conventional climax to suspense might be. An example of this is when the narrator suddenly informs the reader that Eleanor will not marry either Slope or Bertie, destroying some suspense, while still preserving that which surrounds who she will or will not marry.

Trollope also makes use in his narrator of a subtle literary device that has become increasingly common over the last century or so. This is the so-called "style indirecte libre", by the use of which a narrator can move from third-person narrative to an internal viewpoint of a protagonist or to external commentary or description without the use of verbs that would mark these transitions, thus blurring the lines between narrator and protagonist and leaving uncertain where the omniscient narrator's viewpoint ends and that of the character begins.