Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature by Katra A. Byram (review)

Katra Byram analyzes dynamic observer narrators, that is, narrators who tell the story of another character. Such narratives question both episodic and diachronic conceptions of identity, the persistence of historical trauma and the longing for present resolution, and the ethics of speaking for another and speaking for oneself. Byram moves deftly across 200 years, analyzing texts from the long nineteenth century and postwar literature of the long twentieth century. She combines narrative theory, historical analysis, gender analysis, and identity theory to offer a smart and insightful study of this genre.

The book has three sections: a theoretical and historical discussion of narrative theory, dynamic observer narratives, and identity; an analysis of texts by Karl Ludwig Textor (Paul Roderich, 1794), Theodor Storm (Doppelgänger, 1886), and Wilhelm Raabe (Stuffcake, 1891); and an analysis of postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Günter Grass's Cat and Mouse (1961), Peter Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams (1972), Verena Stefan's It was a Rich Life: Report on My Mother's Dying (1993), Hanns-Josef Ortheil's Hedge (1983), and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001). The various epochs and authors in this book all strive to come to terms with the past via narrative, yet while these narrators forge a harmonious connection between past and present, they are also aware that their stories may be self-deceptive or inadequate to the task. And so, telling another's story becomes ethically suspect.

In section 1, Byram surveys approaches to narrative and identity. She contrasts a narrativist view (referencing Taylor, Cavarero, and Ricouer), where narrative unites both past and present action and establishes a coherent identity and morality, with an antinarrativist view (referencing Butler and Strawson), for which narrative also copes with breaks in identity, but is inadequate to the task. Byram combines both approaches, recognizing the importance of narrative in identity formation as well as the historical and social contingence of identity. She then addresses the dynamic observer narrative as a hybrid form that highlights competing interpretive frameworks, particularly those focused on the past. The competing interpretive frameworks prevent a single authoritative interpretation and create narrative unreliability.

Section 2 focuses on the long nineteenth century. Textor's and Storm's narrators offer stable accounts of a protagonist's life, where past and present value structures are reconciled. Yet Byram asserts that the narrators' failure to see potential disruptions and discontinuities—connections between social standing, language, narration, and the guilt of the past—prompts readers to question such resolution. Raabe's text, in contrast, transforms this questioning into full-blown doubt, for both the narrator's and the protagonist's accounts of the past compete for dominance. Narrative is a means to wield power, but the competing voices prevent any final authority or resolution of tensions. This interpretive conflict underlies narratives within the shifting moral and interpretive frameworks of the modern age.

The third section focuses on the postwar era. Drawing on speech act theory, Byram reads Grass's Cat and Mouse as the dynamic observer narrator's failure to successfully confess his past guilt. The narrator would break from his past, but fails to recognize that the language of National Socialism persists in his own narration. Grass's narrator tries to make a confession, but cannot meet the conditions for such a performative utterance. The subsequent chapter focuses on postwar mother narratives. Handke's and Stefan's narrators employ fossilized language, marking their own representational difficulties while highlighting their mothers' helpless reliance on oppressive social expectations. In contrast, Ortheil's novel represents a mother who shielded her son from the language of National Socialism, but her son then finds himself constrained by his mother's language. In narrating her story, he must develop a language of his own to understand the past and to initiate dialogue with her. Mother narratives thus exemplify the ambivalence...