Fielding Tom Jones refers repeatedly to the nature of the author reader relationship Among the metaphors
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the writer speaks. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own, and this could be a character within the story acting as the narrator or an implied author. However, the ironic and intrusive narrator of Tom Jones constantly reflects on the process of creating the novel. Based on this assumption the narrator could be regarded as Henry Fielding (author). Metaphors such as host and customer, a king and subjects, a theatre manager and patrons and fellow travellers in a stagecoach are used by Fielding to describe the relationship between the author and the reader. This paper will discuss the author-reader relationship and how the persona of the author is constructed in Fielding's book The History of Tom Jones a Foundling.
The narrator in Tom Jones is obtrusive because he intervenes in the narration with warnings, satirical comments and moral reflections about what happens. The tone used is conversational and ironic. This self-dramatised narrator could be considered as a fully realised character whose personality is constructed like the other characters as the novel proceeds. Fielding uses various metaphors to describe the author-reader relationship...