Focalization and the First-Person Narrator: A Revision of the Theory

Ever since Gerard Genette coined the term in 1972, the concept of focalization has been the subject of a great deal of debate, some of which has appeared within the pages of Poetics Today. Focalization is defined by Genette as a restriction imposed on the information provided by a narrator about his characters. His well-known triadic typology (zero, internal, and external) is based on a diminishing degree of access to the psychology of the characters. In the terminology of Mieke Bal, internal and external focalization refer instead to the intraor extradiegetic locus of the focalizer, and have nothing to do with psychological penetration.l If we examine these and other theories with an eye toward retrospective personal narration, however, we find that a major revision is in order. Little attention has been paid to the problem of focalization in texts in which narrator and character are the same individual. Traditional studies on point of view have often failed to take into account the many possibilities open to the first-person narrator (FPN), who is of course a fictional creation and not a true autobiographer.2 Even modern theory is often inadequate