Any thoughts on the "magical" parts of the narratives — for example, where the narrator would tell what happened to people in the afterlife (like Mildred walking around the house and settling in bed with Augustus)? Do you think this added anything important to the story or the narrative voice, or did it detract from it?
In "Middlesex," we had a first-person narrator who told us a bunch of stuff he couldn't have possibly known, and he was usually frank that he was just poetically connecting the dots for the sake of literary truth vs. actual truth. What was your sense of Jones' narrator? Did you whole-heartedly accept the narrator's complete omniscience?
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I'm generally not a fan of the "magical" stuff. I like real. (Although I did find the after-death actions of Mildred and Augustus to be rather touching.) I guess you could argue that it did add something to the story, in the sense that knowing what someone's spirit does after death reveals something about that person's character and what's important to them.
This narrator was quite literally omniscient, knowing every character's thoughts and feelings, past and future, even after death. It's an interesting approach. I guess I did accept it, because I didn't question it as I was reading. Interesting connection with "Middlesex." I guess I didn't make that connection because in "Middlesex" the narrator was a person, a character in the novel, who had a specific lifespan and experience and by definition could not be omniscient. In "The Known World," the narrator was God, basically. I accepted the literally truth as the actual truth.
Yeah, the narrative voice was Godlike. I'm not sure how I felt about that, really. I'm trying to think of other slave stories I have read and how they were narrated.
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