A Subject After All – Rethinking the ‘personalized narrator’ of the self‐reflexive first‐person novels of O'Brien, Beckett and Banville

This essay suggests a way of getting beyond the ‘personalized’ narrator traditionally seen as defining the first‐person novel, without giving up completely the idea of an existential relationship between narrator and character. It explores the construction of a subject after all in three self‐reflexive first‐person novels (The Third Policeman, Malone Dies, Ghosts). These self‐reflexive first‐person novels cannot be explained within the existing framework of theories about the first‐person novel as they question and partly undermine the notion of the personalized narrator as a more or less unproblematic entity. To see how this subject is constructed in these self‐reflexive novels, this essay rethinks the ‘experiencing I’ and the ‘narrating I’ respectively in the light of Paul Ricoeur's concept of ‘narrative identity’ and Rimmon‐Kenan's concept of ‘access’. This leads to the notions of a ‘storied subject’ and a ‘speaking subject’. Furthermore it argues that we need to take into consideration a third aspect of the subject, the ‘linguistic subject’ (theoretically based on Benveniste) in order to comprehend the subject of the self‐reflexive first‐person novel.