My Self Reclaimed: The Storytellers

Abstract

Child images often function as purely symbolic figures who define and underline messages about adult society. At their extreme, in the arrested infant for example, these images are children in the abstract, and their function relies on their marginalization and their silence. In this final chapter, I will focus on works which take the opposite approach. The creative surge of the 1980s and 1990s saw much experimentation with the narrative voice. Use of the first-person “I” narrator, with its power to fix the subjectivity of the text, became a key feature of many authors’ works. In some cases, this “I” narrator was a child, in others an adult returning to events of their childhood. It is these two types of narrative that are considered here — childhood remembered and childhood voiced — in works which make exclusive use of an “I” narrator to tell a story set either entirely or predominantly in childhood. In these narratives, the children function as storytellers, a particular type of narrator which Mieke Bal has defined as “a visible, fictive ‘I’ who interferes in his/ her account as much as s/he likes, or even participates as a character in the action.”¹