Losing the Power to Say “I”: Problems of Perspective in the Fiction of Daniel Davis Wood

Abstract

Across the four novels Daniel Davis Wood has published to date, it is possible to delineate an evolving ethics of literary voice. His initial step in Blood and Bone is to subvert the third-person omniscient voice by drastically expanding the imaginative abilities of the first-person narrator, thus showing how the narrator must always speak through a subjective position. The second step involves examining the extent to which the narrator’s desire is not their own: the narrator of Unspeakable is portrayed as the victim of toxic narcissism and media manipulation, for instance, while the protagonist of At the Edge of the Solid World is so alienated from his own emotions that he relives the calamities of others to process his own tragedy. Despite possessing the quasi-omniscient powers of Blood and Bone, these two narrators, far from being godlike, are shown to be puppets of desires that are not their own. The outcome is the dissolution of the subjective “I” in In Ruins, in which the narrator comes to understand the Otherness that permeates human subjectivity. Moral failures are dissolved by the inability to say “I”, making the new ethical task bearing witness to the desire of the Other.