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Katra Byram analyzes dynamic observer narrators, that is, narrators who tell the story of another character. Such narratives question both episodic and diachronic conceptions of identity, the persistence of historical trauma and the longing for present resolution, and the ethics of speaking for another and speaking for oneself. Byram moves deftly across 200 years, analyzing texts from the long nineteenth century and postwar literature of the long twentieth century. She combines narrative theory, historical analysis, gender analysis, and identity theory to offer a smart and insightful study of this genre.
The book has three sections: a theoretical and historical discussion of narrative theory, dynamic observer narratives, and identity; an analysis of texts by Karl Ludwig Textor (Paul Roderich, 1794), Theodor Storm (Doppelgänger, 1886), and Wilhelm Raabe (Stuffcake, 1891); and an analysis of postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Günter Grass's Cat and Mouse (1961), Peter Handke's A Sorrow beyond Dreams (1972), Verena Stefan's It was a Rich Life: Report on My Mother's Dying (1993), Hanns-Josef Ortheil's Hedge (1983), and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001). The various epochs and authors in this book all strive to come to terms with the past via narrative, yet while these narrators forge a harmonious connection between past and present, they are also aware that their stories may be self-deceptive or inadequate to the task. And so, telling another's story becomes ethically suspect.
In section 1, Byram surveys approaches to narrative and identity. She contrasts a narrativist view (referencing Taylor, Cavarero, and Ricouer), where narrative unites both past and present action and establishes a coherent identity and morality, with an antinarrativist view (referencing Butler and Strawson),...