“Tom Jones” by Henry Fielding (post 6): Multiple Narrators

Sometimes the narrator’s self-reference is “we,” as in Part I, Book I, Chapter I, “The introduction to the work.” But in another metafictional chapter, Part III, Book XVI, Chapter I, the narrator’s self-reference is “I,” followed by Chapter II, a continuation of the story, in which the narrator’s self-reference is “we.” So the alternation between “I” and “we” does not have any obvious reason.

I can’t accept that the inconsistency was simply due to impulsiveness. The author would have corrected a meaningless inconsistency when revising, unless he never reread and revised anything he wrote. And if the latter were true, why was he afraid to see what he had written? Did he sometimes have a memory gap for writing it?

So how many narrators are there? Just two, “I” and “we”? Or does “we” refer to a group of co-writers? I don’t know how many narrative personalities there are in this novel, but it looks like more than one.

1. Henry Fielding. [The History of] Tom Jones [A Foundling] [1749]. Edited by John Bender and Simon Stern. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Added the same evening: I don't want to give the impression that the particular chapters I cited above are isolated instances. It was where I happened to be up to in reading the novel, which I compared with the beginning. I just now took a random look in the middle of novel and saw a place where "I" and "we" are both used by the narrator in the same short chapter (chapters in this novel are short and numerous). This narrator inconsistency is recurrent. And I don't recall seeing such alternating or mixed self-reference in other old novels, but if you can explain it linguistically or rhetorically, please submit your comment.