ABSTRACT
Thus Robert Colby opens his penetrating study of Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity} It is still true that Thackeray is known primarily for Vanity Fair - and perhaps Henry Esmond. Recent works such as John Reed's Punishment and Forgiveness and Micael Clarke's Thackeray and Women continue Colby's work of presenting Thackeray holistically, expanding upon George Saintsbury's comment that Thackeray's novels are "children of one family".2 These studies are primarily thematic and contextual and, certainly, theme and context are important ingredients in Thackeray's unified work. But he is also rhetorically and stylistically all of a piece, and this recognizable Thackerayean presence, which Colby calls "Protean" (5), acts out a rhetorical intent that ties narrative technique and story together as mirror images of each other. Not only do his themes reappear within one story pattern re-dramatized from novel to novel, but each novel can be read holistically through the intra-relations between (to use Peter Rabinowitz's terms) the implied author and the "authorial" audience (the implied reader), the story and the "narrative" audience (the narrative reader), and what I will be calling the narrator and narratorial reader.3
