Other Voices

To focus attention on the voice of the narrator in children's literature, Charlotte F. Otten and Gary D. Schmidt have collected forty-one essays sectioned by genre: illustrated book, folk literature and myth, fantasy, realism, poetry, historical fiction, biography, and informational books. Each section has an introduction by Otten or Schmidt, one group of essays by authors or illustrators ("The Authorial Voice"), and another group by critics ("The Critical Voice"). In their preface, the editors acknowledge that "the growth of literary theory" has brought "an increasing awareness of the complexities of narration"; nevertheless, they "hoped not to impose a theory of narration" on their contributors but rather to "act as a stimulus to inquiry and discovery" (xvii). While the collection does not place theory at its foreground, an anatomy of its unifying subject can be used to survey some of its contents.

A distinction between the narrator and actual author is usually acknowledged, if tacitly, even though some essayists discuss the role of autobiographical experience in artistic creation (for example, Maurice Sendak, Barbara Cooney, Ray Bradbury; Patricia Morley on William Kurelek, Janice Alberghene on Jean Fritz). In addition, Jill Paton Walsh insists on the importance of this distinction. Describing narrative voice as a "mask," Walsh argues that it must never slip to reveal the "real author" and thus distract the reader from experiencing the subject "unpestered, unobstructed" by the real author's "own feelings" (170-71). Sometimes blurred, however, is a distinction between the narrator and what Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), called the "implied author," an intelligence perceivably creating and shaping the entire work, narrative voice included. In "The Designing Narrator," for example, Milton Meltzer illustrates, from his own experience, how a "biographer tries to give a form to flux, to impose a design upon chronology" (333); and, in a similarly substantive essay, "Singing the Blood Song: The Narrator's Choices in Retelling Norse Myth," Alice Mills discusses how ancient myths are reshaped to be made accessible for modern readers.

More clearly focusing on the narrator are essays that discuss books exhibiting various kinds of first- and third-person narration. Joan W. Blos and Janet Lunn discuss how their struggles to create both immediacy and authenticity in their historical fiction resulted in different choices of narrator. In writing A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1837-1838 (1985), Blos found that the paucity of dialogue and description typical in diaries allowed her to write a kind of first-person narrative that minimized her anxiety about including inauthentic details. Writing about an early-nineteenth-century Scotch immigrant to Canada in Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (1987), Lunn decided that she could neither tell Mary Urquhart's story as her own nor as an "impartial observer"; instead, she told the story from Mary's "point of view but not in her voice," becoming "a sort of doppelgänger attached to her as firmly as her own shadow" (276-77). This kind of third-person narration is discussed by Lois R. Kuznets in "Henry James and the Storyteller: The Development of a Central Consciousness in Realistic Fiction for Children." Illustrating her generalizations by discussions of eight children's books, Kuznets describes an "unintrusive third-person narrator" (187) often developing in enlightenment along with the protagonist, as in the narrator's adoption of Lambert Strether's point of view but not his voice in James' The Ambassadors. The enlightenment possible with this kind of narration, as well as the distinction between narrator and implied author, is beautifully illustrated by Ann Donovan's discussion of William Mayne's Drift (1985). Being narrated in third person but from two very different points of view, Mayne's historical novel invites the reader to re-create a third version of the story being shaped by the implied author.

The kind of third-person narration Kuznets describes presents an instructive alternative to the first-person narration found in...