Everett’s Hypernarrator

Author:
  • JRJudith Roof
    Judith Roof

Abstract
The narrators of Percival Everett’s many novels have become hypernarrators, fronting a far more complex, systemic, multidimensional effect that reflects the growing complexity and paradigmatic shifts of narrative itself. Insofar as narrators are an effect of the narrative, the narrators of Everett’s later novels such as Erasure, American Desert, and Glyph, point to a species of narrative that produces a rich, polyvalent resonance from the dissonances of simultaneity and multidirectionality. Many of Everett’s novels explore the construction and dimensionality of the narrator in narratives that destabilize any possibility of linearity, continuity, predictable cause/effect relationships, or correlations of signification. These narrators simultaneously expose the means by which narrators are constructed in narrative and extend and amplify the possibilities of narrators no longer tied to the imaginary Newtonian coordinates of impersonation.