Shifting Points of View in First-Person Narratives: Philip Roth’s Human Stain and Jean Echenoz’ Nous trois

Shifting Points of View in First-Person Narratives: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Jean Echenoz’ Nous trois.

Perspectivism, which is now often discussed alongside the linguistic concept of voice, and first-person narration have in common the attempt to render subjectivity and limited perception, but they trigger widely diverging expectations in the reader. Perspectivism and first-person narration remain bound however as two poles balanced on each end of the same continuum, as is observable in the recent work of two authors who, in their determination to collapse the opposition, reinvent the notion of reliability.
Philip Roth’s narrator in The Human Stain (2000) discards all usual requirements relating to his seemingly conventional role of insightful writer-investigator-confidant and, dipping into his own subjective experience of American history, becomes the authoritative mouthpiece of his generation by recreating the inner voices of his fellowmen.
In parallel, Jean Echenoz achieves a tour de force in Nous trois (1992) when he brings together a first-person narrator and a character focalized by a third-person narrator. As the two characters are engaged in antagonistic narrative programs, Echenoz’s feat is to place the reader in a double bind where empathy and reliability must give way to distance and irony.
Whereas The Human Stain evokes the humanism of The Great Gatsby, Echenoz is tributary to the various attempts in the Nouveau Roman to sabotage traditional novelistic characterization. Reworking their respective literary heritage, Roth and Echenoz thus redefine the first-person narrator’s role by evacuating the question of his/her reliability, but to contrasting ends.