V.V. (3) "Young Stencil the world adventurer"

[Don Corathers]

jbor wrote:

Are we so sure that it isn't Stencil himself with his penchant for 
referring to himself in the third person, who is generating this
introduction to the reader 

(snip)



It's a very good question. And since under the terms you propose Stencil would be a profoundly unreliable narrator, one that probably cannot be resolved.

For now at least I'm inclined to take Stencil's bio at face value, if only because that way there's one less set of contradictions and ambiguities to try to hold in my head. I don't read the biography as all that laudatory. He is, as noted, pretty much a mooch, one who wandered purposelessly until he was 38 years old, and his pursuit of V. is "grim, joyless," unproductive, and conflicted.

But for the sake of argument, where would you say Stencil's narration might begin and end? With the sentence "Young Stencil the world adventurer..." (52.18)? And ending when Stencil leaves Fergus's apartment near the bottom of page 57? 

I guess there's a good case for a change in the narrative point of view on page 52, right after the intimately second person description of Rachel. ("You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes," which is incidentally reminiscent of the p 59 descripton of McClintic Sphere: "you could see the twin lines...") But there's not a similar change of voice when Stencil leaves the apartment. We stay at the party and watch Esther getting hooked up with the fraternity boy Brad.

Don