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In an early review of Alexis Wright's 2006 novel Carpentaria, Alison Ravenscroft makes special mention of the narrator's voice. She says reading Carpentaria is 'like being spoken to by someone with a voice you can trust, someone standing close by.' She argues Wright has come up with a language to address 'the question of the oral and the written word,' and Ravenscroft adds: 'Of all this novel's wonderful inventions, the narrator may be the most remarkable' (Ravenscroft, Review). Since then, Carpentaria has attracted both critical acclaim and considerable scholarly attention, and although references to the unusual voice of the narrator run like a common thread through much of the commentary on the novel-it was been variously called 'a storyteller's voice' (Lowry 2), 'an expression of Aboriginal communal consciousness' (Aitken 21), and 'magisterial yet colloquial' (Perlez)-no one appears to have taken up the gauntlet that Ravenscroft very clearly threw down. That is to say, what many consider to be Carpentaria's most remarkable invention, its narrative voice, has not been investigated in depth.
This may be because Wright appears to defy diegetic conventions, making it difficult, initially, to imagine who the narrator is and where to locate him/her within the text. He/she is mostly heterodiegetic, to use Gerard Genette's standard term for a narrator who is not a character in the story he/she tells (244-45), but switching occurs between singular and plural voices, between thirdperson omniscience and second-person familiarity. Then there are constant exclamatory interjections in the narration, such as: 'Goodness!' (14), 'Well!' (23), and 'Imagine that' (270). Who is the narrator addressing? Where do you position yourself as a reader here? The clues to unravelling Carpentaria's narratological puzzle, I suggest, are to be found in considering the assertion of orality that Wright seeks to impose on the text. Put simply, the assertion of orality yields narrative structure in the case of Carpentaria. Therefore, this essay, which primarily investigates narrative voice and proposes a narrative framework for Carpentaria, will begin by discussing how Wright privileges orality in her novel. By 'privileging orality' I mean to say that Wright not only affirms orality's importance in Aboriginal life, as a cultural asset that has survived colonisation, she goes further: she challenges Western notions of orality's deficiencies, such as the...