The Morality of Irony and Unreliable Narrative in Trollope's "The Warden" and "Barchester Towers"

M UCH OF THE DELIGHT OF READING Trollope the result of his tone: there a relaxing quality to his pacing, a likable combination of sentiment, good sense, and sympathetic alertness to his voice, and always a sense the narrator understands human weakness and transforms the worst to humor through tender irony. To be sure Trollope prizes this sociability with his readers: Our doctrine, says the narrator of Barchester Towers, confiding his method and seeming to practice it, is the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other (127). In complete contrast to an author like Kafka, who maintains literature must act as an axe to the frozen sea within his readers, Trollope claims it the first necessity of the writer's position that he make himself pleasant (Autobiography 195), he charm his readers, though his readers will probably not know they have been charmed (212). The undeniable pleasantness of the Trollopian narrator, however, has consistently misled (charmed in a double sense) his readers, for the teller's role in The Warden and Barchester Towers subtle and complex: his surface jocularity and frequent light-handed digressions or intrusions underscore Trollope's serious thematic intentions and mask a pervasively manipulative, complicated, and ironic technique. At every level--syntax, tone, diction, structure, idea Trollope's narrator disarms while he operates, creating in the reader an unwitting moral receptiveness through what Robert Heilman calls twotone (301) effects, prose speaks to the reader on several levels at once, while suspending commitment to competing sympathies and perspectives.'

Aesthetics · Art · Diction · Epistemology · Irony · Linguistics · Literature · Morality · Narrative · Lexicography and Language Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Themes in Literature Analysis

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