The Narrator in Don Juan

The narrator in Lord Byron's "Don Juan" is rather hysterical. As the Norton introduction to the work suggests, "The controlling element of Don Juan is not the narrative but the narrator" because the narrator helps to further engage the poem with history (673). The editors go so far as to say that the narrator "is one of the greatest comic inventions in English literature" (673). Because I began reading the poem under this impression, I tried to suss out exactly what makes the narrator funny.

I think that at least part of the reason why the narrator is so funny is his rather paradoxical voice: he uses both hyperbole and affected casualness to inject his own voice into the events that he narrates and the result is pretty hilarious. Clench Brooks, a notable contributor to the school of New Literary Criticism, argued for the centrality of paradox and irony in understanding poetry. He believed that poetry ought to be examined in a vacuum and the primary concern with criticism is the problem of unity (according to Wikipedia: "the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole"). In other words, seemingly contradictory poetic elements, images, techniques, etc. could actually cohere to form a more united whole. I think of this as an almost 1+1=3 situation. To the extent that I have studied Brooks in my other classes, Brooks applies this strategy or literary criticism to poems that are much more visual than an epic-type poem like Don Juan, but I think the theory in its basic form applies here as well.

The narrator in Jon Duan fluctuates between moments of utter hyperbole and an extremely blasé tone. For example, when he depicts Don Juan's parents' relationship he narrates, "Don José and the Donna Inez led/ For some time an unhappy sort of life,/ Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead" (201). In one line, the narrator takes on a blasé tone by describing the type of life the couple led as "an unhappy sort," which is a qualifier that one could use to describe something rather meaningless (i.e. the apple of a mealy sort). In the very next line, he transitions to pretty extreme exaggeration and even emphasizes the extremity of wishing one's spouse dead even more because he uses a "not.... but...." construction. Because of this construction, the more extreme option comes second, so it hits the reader right over the head. The effect is comic in its seeming contradictions yet somehow wholly united tone of voice.