Telling our story: on 'we' literary narratives

Abstract

In this article I seek to outline some of the distinctive features of the narrative 'we', both as speech position or narrative voice and as a narrated entity, that is, a collectivity defined by a bond of some kind, and engaged in a series of activities. From a linguistic perspective, 'we' does not designate multiple 'I's, but rather an individual 'we'-sayer, together with one or more co-utterers and/or hearers and/or others, all of whom belong to the reference class of this 'we'. Salient properties of literary 'we' narratives of the twentieth-century on the level of narration are as follows: there is precisely one 'we' sayer on the highest level of embedding; the nature of the 'we' group is defined by features belonging to the narrated domain; what the 'we' sayer asserts about his/her group concerns its identity, actions, and states in the narrated domain; the 'we' sayer is not a designated spokesman for the group - he or she speaks about, but not for it- and the literary 'we' narrative is therefore not a group speech act. On the level of the narrated, a discussion of the 'we' as topic entity includes at least the following three dimensions: group actions, especially joint actions; the group's sense of 'we'-ness; the group's self awareness and self image. Literary 'we' narratives are, however, not completely collectivistic. They maintain a balance between individual and group records of action, especially with respect to verbal and mental actions. They consequently include passages in the 'I', 'you', or 'he or she' mode, and the narrator often refers to himself/herself as a distinct, identifiable 'I', not just the impersonal 'we' sayer of official pronouncements. I conclude with some probable reasons for the rarity of literary 'we' narratives.