Hunt for the Implied Author

So, best beloved, who and/or where is the implied author in Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector?  

The who?

Long time readers of this blog may remember how I’ve pondered this concept in regard to other stories. The idea of the implied author, as originally set forth by Wayne Booth, is that in addition to a book’s narrator and the real, human author, readers may experience a third entity in a story, the implied author. The implied author is the assumed creator of the story’s narrative choices, ideas and style, and being sensitive to this entity can reveal how a story constructs meaning and how it positions the reader. If a real author, in this case Frederick Busch, has published other texts (he has), each one may have a separate implied author. Finally, the implied author is not an objective feature of a story, like the names of the characters, but a subjective, individual choice that each reader makes, i.e. each reader may hear a “different drummer” when it comes to identifying implied author.

This is unnecessarily intellectual. Stop right now.

What about this particular story?

The Night Inspector’s narrator is Billy Bartholomew; he tells the story in a first person, simple past narrative that, as we have said, makes minimally marked leaps in time. As M, one of the characters, says, “We live in several moments, several places, at once.”

The book’s “real” author is Frederick Busch, who one could learn about in a biography. One might imagine that he was a war veteran with experience of violence, that he was familiar with human emotions of hatred, grief, and the desire for revenge. It’s clear he was a fine writer.  

Are all of Mr. Busch’s books the same in terms of use of time, historical focus, and style?

No.

Let’s compare one of Mr. Busch’s short stories, Are We Pleasing You Tonight? published in 2000. The Night Inspector came out in 1999. In Are We…, the narrator is Peter, a restaurant owner who speaks in first person, simple past tense, implying that he is looking back on a story and telling it.

So far, then, this Busch chap sat at his keyboard and wrote a short story and a novel with the same structural features. The characters are all American and literate.

Sounds like this implied author thing you’re going on about is the same in both stories. Very well.

Wait! my friends. Stop! —as the other guy said.

The language of the two pieces differs. As mentioned, in The Night Inspector, contractions of English speech are rarely used, imparting a nineteenth-century feel to the prose. Are We… contracts a lot: “;it’s a gorgeous wine. So’s the Arneis.” This usage gives the story a modern feel. French language phrases are peppered through Are We…: “daube Aixoise, ca va, café filtre,” and numerous names of wine. And this seems appropriate usage for the owner of a French restaurant. In contrast, The Night Inspector makes use of many nineteenth-century slang terms: the bald-headed hermit, fizz and sizzle, and of course, the ornate vocabulary of the character M.

M—a fictional character based on the real Herman Melville, represents a major difference in the two texts. Are We… is situated in the recent past and does not refer to real historical characters or events. Night Inspector does, with extensive passages referring to the American Civil War and the real writer Melville recreated as a major character.

As mentioned, the concept of time is handled in different ways. In Night Inspector. time jumps between paragraphs with no change of tense. In Are We…, the time of the story stays primarily in the present but when it does shift to the past, it is heavily marked: The protagonist, Peter, goes to the back door of his restaurant and smokes a cigarette. Then, he apparently recalls events of that day’s morning. “At eight in the morning, in the kitchen of my house, four miles away…I’d made the café filtre and opened The New York Times.” There follows several paragraphs of remembering. Then, a new paragraph; “I put the cigarette out against the wall…” So we see that Are We… uses a more typical style of marking leaps in time by changes in verb tense.  

Wait, wait. You’ve proved your point in this snooze-fest—the two texts by the same author are different. So what? They’re two different texts!

That is the point. They are different but are written by the same author. The theory of the implied author is that the human author creates a different persona to write each story she/he writes. This persona guides the reader’s perspective, emotions, and understanding, often by aligning them with a character, viewpoint, or theme.

The narrator of Night Inspector, Billy, is a violent man who sets out to use people for his own ends, feeling, I believe, entitled to do so because of his wartime injuries. However, because of the way the story shows him, the reader cares about this possibly unsympathetic character as he transforms into a better person, albeit still murderous. The way the book does this—the way the implied author does this—would require considerable analysis, however one clue is simply to observe how close the story sticks to Billy. The closeness makes the reader care because for all his faults, Billy comes across as intensely human. Another way is the pervasive theme in the story of trying to save children in peril.

Are We… makes use of a similar strategy; the story stays close to Peter and shows how, beneath his blasé exterior and his condescension toward his clientele, he is struggling with considerable pain over a loss, barely keeping himself together. He overhears this passage, which mirrors his own self: “…every time, in spite of my best efforts, I remember the dishonesty and disloyalty. How can I forgive them? And I try. You compartmentalize your life, and soon you get locked in one of those compartments. And I was locked in another…”

Till next time.

#Frederick Busch #The Night Inspector #Alan Bray