Disrupted Lines: The Illegitimately Born Narrator in Dostoevsky and Hurston

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay explores the illegitimately born first-person narrator as a figure and technical device in two very different novels: Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). I argue that both Dostoevsky and Hurston use illegitimately born narrators to extend the novel form, centering the "voice" of a character who defies the genre's conventions at the time and place of writing. At the same time, Hurston and Dostoevsky use the figure of illegitimacy to unsettle their readers' assumptions about the rights of fiction itself; that is, the social, political, or spiritual weight of a sustained encounter with the author's "house rules." Unexpectedly, by ceding the narrative to illegitimately born and socially marginalized characters, both authors signal self-consciously utopian visions of novelistic narrative's lasting power.