Memoir narrators can flatten the very voices they claim to liberate.
Evidence
It is for the same reason that the young women’s voices in Reading Lolita in Tehran, despite each one’s carefully outlined tribulations and sense of entrapment, tend to be hard to distinguish, overwhelmed as they are by the strident tone of their narrator and teacher. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 743
Categorization
Category: Craft and Method
- XREF: A cautionary counterexample to the reader’s own framing of narration: the single dominant narrator here erases polyphony, which is exactly the risk to test against Changez’s self-justifying narration in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — though Morey likely argues Changez’s voice is more contested.