Narrative Tecnique of Tom Jones

NARRATIVE TECNIQUE OF TOM JONES

Fielding influenced the main tradition of the English novel through the eighteenth century and t he nineteenth century. With the character Tom Jones, he introduced a new kind of fictional hero-a good hearted, h earted, well intentioned, generous young man with ordinary human weakness, one who yields to temptation with women and to make errors in  judgement. From Fielding‟s Fielding‟s point of view art is artifice or the deliberately crafted (this view contrasts contrasts with modern theories of realism as a “slice of life”). Fielding as well as Richardson and Sterne was regarded as startlingly realistic and widely admired by contemporary readers on the continent. Fielding beli eved, as did most eighteenth century writers and educated readers, that the purpose of art is to create pleasure which is both civilized and civilizing. Coleridge declared the plot of Tom Jones was one of the three perfect plots in i n all literature. The narrator enters the novel from the beginning and rarely leaves for an extended length of time. He explains every nature of the story, both the plot and the method of writing. He shows how the plot thickens with each added character and explicates why he utilizes a specific form of writing in one instance rather than in another (such as the use of a quasi-epic style). Also, every book begins with a formal introduction from the narrator. He also does exactly what he says, such as ending a chapter directly when he says he will end it. The chapter closes and the next opens. This humor and literal-mindedness of the narrator mirrors Sterne‟s in his Tristram Shandy. The narrator openly communicates whit the audience, to the point of dictating exactly who makes up the audience at specific times. Sometimes the audience is wise, and other times, foolish. Sometimes the narrator speaks only to a feminine audience; other times, to a masculine one, and others, to a combination of the two. In Fielding there are many touchstones (= quotes) from Pope, Swift, Homer, Francis, Shakespeare, and others. These touchstones take the form of both verse and prose as well as Latin and English. Fielding will translate the Latin, sometimes literally and sometimes by quoting another author who says the same general concept but uses a different terminology. Another aspect of this contains the “battle “battl e of the books”, also known as the “classics” versus the “moderns”. Fielding stays along the middle of the t wo sides of this “battle” because he mentions both the “classic” (Homer etc.) and the “modern” (Pope etc.). Thus, he has the ability to appeal to both sides of the argument.

When one is reading Tom Jones the author himself seems to draw his armchair into the room “and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English”. Samuel Johnson disapproved of Tom Jones‟s libertinism in the strongest possible terms. Fielding is regarded with a mixture of acceptance and contempt, as a worthy boy who did the basic engineering for the novel because he invented the clockwork plot, but tiresomely boisterous, “broad” to the point of being insensitive to fine shades, lacking in any temperament of the higher aspirations, and hampered by a style which keeps his prosy commonsense. The most original and memorable element of Tom Jones, however, is the narrative voice informing the action and discoursing on the philosophy of writing to the reader in the introductory chapters. Fielding controls the reader's response thorough the urbane, tolerant presence of the figure of the omniscient author, a polished and rational r ational gentleman with a pronounced sense of the ridiculous who emerges as the true moral focus in the novel. While this technique sacrifices to a certain extent the sense of identification and verisimilitude provided by the first-person or epistolary forms used by Defoe and Richardson, the reading experience is enriched by the analysis of the t he all-knowing 'author.' On the other hand, the wry narrative voice accounts for various comic effects Fielding achieves i n this remarkable novel; it is often the detached description which transforms a melodramatic situation into a comic one.

Fielding‟s prose has a more relaxed version of this feature, supplemented by Fielding‟s habitual display of narrative management. Tom Jones offer a witty parade of the narrator‟s right to proceed in any way he pleases, his manipulation of the events and his commentaries about them, his discursive „introductory‟ chapters, and his frequent conversations withthe reader. Proceeding which way the author pleases is a directly opposite claim to that t hat in which a narrator‟s self expression purported to be guided by his pen rather than the other way round.