A protagonist that embodies the flaws and weaknesses of the writer distracts the reader from the narrative itself.
I partially agree. I think this is a topical question because I think the current trend in critical analysis is to read everything is somewhat biographical. Reading now, the modern reader would probably search out something, a character attribute that they would then apply to the author. There are stories where that viewpoint is completely valid, like the Swimmer being about Cheever’s alcoholism, so I’m not dismissing that school of thought entirely, I just think that it’s one that’s over-prescribed currently.
However, I would say that a protagonist deliberately intended to embody the author in some way actually helps a reader to examine the narrative – in that, once you understand the protagonist as representing the author to whatever degree, you then want to move on and examine the narrative to see what effect the author-protagonist has had on it: is it a slice of life, clearly something that actually happened to the author, or is it structured so as to enhance something, an idea or information about the author, that they want to put across.
I agree with your point that a protagonist embodying the author helps us examine the narrative - within this we can see the extent to which the flaws of the author are relevant to the story itself :)
ReplyDeleteIt is a problem that every novel is now subjected to some kind of vague Freudian analysis rather than taking at face value the characters themselves. I think like anything it depends on how well you know the author, correct me if I’m wrong but authors are yet to have their lives so publicised as actors and so the layman isn’t going to be reading a book and being distracted as such. Only when you know the author in question and can thus draw similarities between them and their characters can it become distracting to a fault.
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