Who is the "I" that tells my story?

 

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I hope it’s not a cop-out to say that my favorite narrator exists in my favorite (fiction) book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. The book is a semi-autobiographical recounting of fantastical events that take place in a half-imagined version of the author’s childhood. Most of the story is narrated 1^st person, potentially unreliably, from the perspective of a fictional 6-year-old version of the author, though the beginning and ending are narrated by a world-weary fictional version of the adult author.

The experience is so powerful as an adult reader because you sympathize with the adult narrator and his sadness, his exhaustion, his nostalgia, and his sense of being overwhelmed by memory when the sight of his childhood friend’s pond opens the floodgates of events he’d forgotten. It is also so immersive when the narration switches from the adult narrator to the child version of himself. He speaks like a small child would speak, he looks at the world in the way a child looks at the world, his interests are child-like, etc. And yet, the genius of Gaiman’s work (in my opinion) is that he persuades you, the reader, to believe that beyond behind or underneath the surfaces of what we can touch, see, hear, etc. there is a deep, old, powerful magic that only asks us to look for it to know that it’s there. The child narrator does misreport some things due to naiveté, yes, but he also is able to see the deeper magic around him that the adults in his life simply cannot (or will not) see.

This particular narration style and the conceit of the novel are very interesting from a narratology standpoint. They sit right on the apex of the argument between traditional narratology and more recent narratologists who argue for a “middle way” of considering either the author himself or the fictional narrator to be “the highest textual speaker position.” In one layer, we consider that Neil Gaiman himself considers this novel to be semi-autobiographical, himself being portrayed in an intentional sense by the child narrator. In another layer, we consider the fact that 1.) this is magical realism verging on fantasy, and so some of the events and characters do not resemble our known universe, and 2.) even if this were a straight fictionalized autobiography, Gaiman as an adult man cannot seamlessly depict himself as a child using a child’s voice, thinking a child’s thoughts because he is no longer a child; he is thinking with his adult brain. I think Gaiman would agree with this, as he has spoken about how this is a novel about what we lose as we grow up and move on. Thus the narrator is the author, and at the same time he is a fictional character.