[lit-ideas] Re: nameless celebrities?

Judy wrote: you seem to be the world authority on unnamed persons!

____

There are undoubtedly billions of silent or unnamed people who know more 
than I do about unnamed narrators. They have probably been busy with 
other things today.

It is worth bringing up (what Henry James referred to as) "central 
intelligence," where the narrator is omniscient with respect to the 
overall external fictional situation, but is internally omniscient with 
respect to the consciousness of one particular character.

This is almost like having an unnamed narrator, in that the central 
intelligence of the novel is directly related to character X but not the 
same as X, and so could be X's identical twin narrating from the 
distance of years.

Someone who knows all the external events of a fiction and also the 
intimate thoughts of one character is almost like a character, a 
busybody friend of the family.

So maybe all novels that use this narrative technique could be 
considered to employ an unnamed central character as narrator?

Best,
Y

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