452
MARY McCARTHY
Marlow, testifying to having met him in reliable company, over
cigars, claret, a polished mahogany table, and so on. The same
function is served by the narrator in Dostoevsky's
The Pos–
sessed,
who writes in the excited manner of a small-town gossip
("Then I rushed to Varvara Petrovna's") telling you everything
that went on in that extraordinary period, which everybody
in
town
is
still talking about, that began when young Stavrogin bit
the governor's ear. He tells what he saw
himself
and what he
had on hearsay and pretends to sift the collective evidence as
to what exactly happened and in what order. Faulkner's fav–
orite narrator
is
Gavin Stevens, the lawyer, chosen obviously
because the town lawyer, accustomed to weighing evidence,
would be the most reliable witness---one of the first sources a
newspaper reporter would be likely to consult.
There
is
the shadow of an "I" in
The Brothers Kara–
mazov,
but
The Possessed
is
the only important novel of Dos–
toevsky's that
is
told straight through in the first person, i.e., by
a local busybody who seems to have seized the pen.
The Pos–
sessed
(in Russian
The Devils)
is the most demonic of aJl Dos–
toevsky's novels-the most "unnatural," unfilial, "Gothic." It
would seem that the device of the narrator, the eye-witness "I,"
like Esther Summerson in
Bleak House
(not the autobiograph–
ical "I" of
David Copperfield
or of Proust's Marcel, who
is
something more than a witness), is more often used in novels
whose material is exotic or improbable than in the plain novel of
ordinary life, like
Middlemarch
or
Emma
or any of Trollope.
These novels of ordinary life put no strain on the reader's
credulity; he believes without the testimony of witnesses. The
first-person narrator
is
found in Conrad, in Melville, and in
Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Jane Eyre,
all of which
center around drafty, spooky old houses and are related to
the ghost story. In the same way James, who rarely used the
first-person narrator, does so with the governess in
his
ghost–
story,
The Turn of the Screw.
In other words, on the periphery
of the novel, on the borderline of the tale or the adventure
