Outline's Silence – In Search for A Silent Narrator

Abstract: Outline’s Silence: In Search for a Silent Narrator is a Bachelor research paper that hopes to open a discussion about Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) and the possibility that an absent and silent narrator could lead to a new and innovative writing mode. The paper bases its theory on Hayden White’s “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980) where White argues that moralization is unavoidable as long as there is a narrator in the text (27). Roland Barthes’s theories for a neutral writing mode and the notion of silence as they can be found in Writing Degree Zero (1953) and The Neutral (2002) respectively, are used here as the basis of argumentation. Outline’s narrator and her desire for passivity and silence are analyzed according to Barthes’s theories while its author’s writing is also examined for its neutrality. White’s work is used to support the paper’s argumentation that it is unlikely a narrator will be absent from a narrativized text. The paper concludes that although there is a desire for neutrality and silence both in the narrator’s character and in the author’s writing mode, this proves infeasible to apply in practice.