ABSTRACT
John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published in 1969 but deals mainly with story events that took place in the year 1867. At one point in the narrative, the heroine, Sarah Woodruffe, returns to her room and unpacks some goods she has bought. The sequence is narrated as follows:
What is clear about this passage is that part of the narration exists as a very conventional third-person, past tense, realist account, telling what Sarah did in a manner that would not be alien to a history book and which seems fitting for a novel written just over a hundred years after the period that it depicts. Yet another part of the narration consists of an almost unseemly interruption of the events by the narrator, who offers first-hand information about one of Sarah’s artefacts and its present-day fate. Before analysing this passage further, it is worth saying that the narrator’s comments constitute a typical example of the ‘rupturing’ effect in fiction, an effect which consists of the narrating agency revealing itself and which is frequently called ‘postmodernist’.
