Alternate Personality Narrates: Literary criticism knows, but cannot explain, that the first-person narrator in Roxana (post 4) by Daniel Defoe (post 5) is Susan.

“…As a matter of fact, the narrator[’s real name is] not ‘Roxana’ but ‘Susan’. We discover this, in passing, late in the book…The keeping hidden of her original name (and of her married names) will not, in itself, surprise any reader familiar with Defoe’s fiction. All the narrators of his novels change or conceal their names…In none of Defoe’s other novels, however, is the imposition of a new name as perturbing as it is in Roxana…

“The woman…often finds it useful, and more comfortable, to be ‘Incognito’…(1, p. xvi-xvii).

It is not merely “perturbing.” It is bizarre, and requires an explanation, why Susan doesn’t use her real name, and why the reader learns her real name only late in the novel, and then only when it is mentioned in passing. Is it that she knows her real name, but doesn’t identify with it, because she sees herself as a different person? Who is this first-person narrator, psychologically speaking?

The above reminds me of a past post on Dostoevsky’s The Double:

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Post #3 on Dostoevsky’s The Double; Post #2 quoting Mikhail Bakhtin

“But who tells the story in The Double?…one gets the impression that the narration is dialogically addressed to Golyadkin himself, it rings in Golyadkin’s own ears as another’s voice taunting him, as the voice of his double, although formally the narration is addressed to the reader.” 

As I previously said, the story is not really about Golyadkin’s downfall. It is about the double’s triumph. “History is written by the victors.” The double—the alternate personality—tells the story.

Perhaps Roxana is narrated by Susan’s alternate personality.

1. Daniel Defoe. Roxana [1724]. Introduction by John Mullan. Oxford University Press, 2008.