The eye/I upon the event: a study of narrative voice in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men

Résumé

This thesis is a study of the relationship between the narrating self and its enunciation in Robert Penn Warren's All the king's men. The concept of point of view is surveyed and discussed and the poetics of narrative is opposed to the poetics of drama, since All the king's men is a novelization of a play by the same author. It is argued that narrative prose allows for a temporal perspective and is thus the adequate genre for the portrayal of man trapped in the complex tensions of time, a major theme of the novel. The narrative discourse is then analyzed through the categories of time, mode and voice, with the narrator's hesitation being examined in terms of function at the linguistic level. Finally, the fragmented and specular pattern of the enunciation is investigated by examining the insertion of the Cass Mastern episode in the narrative. A concluding reflexion focuses on the other voices which permeate the narrator's discourse and confirm the fragmented configuration of the text.