Living to Tell about It

In Living to Tell about It, James Phelan takes up the challenges offered by diverse narratives including Kathryn Harrison''s The Kiss, Ernest Hemingway''s "Now I Lay Me," Kazuo Ishiguro''s Remains of the Day, Frank McCourt''s Angela''s Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov''s Lolita, and John Edgar Wideman''s "Doc''s Story." Phelan''s compelling readings cover important theoretical ground by introducing a valuable distinction between disclosure functions (communications from the implied author to the authorial audience) and narrator functions (communications from the character narrator to the narratee). Phelan also identifies significant types of character narration (also known as first-person narration), including restricted, suppressed, and mask narrations. In addition, Phelan proposes new understandings of such ingrained concepts of narrative theory as unreliable narration, the implied author, focalization, and lyric narrative.

Utilizing what Phelan and