Author-narrator in John Fowles' the French lieutenant's woman

Abstract EN

John Fowles (1926-2005) in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) seems to be obsessed with eighteenth and nineteenth century novel tradition.

Bernard Bergonzi has rightly declared that "no matter how unflinchingly the novelist may try to deal with wholly new kinds of experience, he can't escape being influenced by the novels that have been written before him" (1).

Fowles uses in his novel the traditional nineteenth century plot to convey to his readers the love affairs between Charles and Sarah.

This paper focuses on the traditional omniscient author-narrator who is similar in many aspects to narrators used by Fielding and Sterne with some modifications.

The narrator appears in several voice guises, but what is new about this narrator is that Fowles uses a twentieth century narrator commenting on nineteenth century events and characters.

The first-person narrator is widely used by novelists before.

A good example here is the hero of Dickens' novel, David Copperfield (1850) personified by David.

Or the narrator may be a peripheral observer such as Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), or a minor character like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1922) (2) , whereas in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), the 'I' which appears in the text almost always refers to the author who interludes occasionally in the text.