Fantasy as Antifantasy: 10 Deconstruction in Antifantasy

10 Fraudulent Narration: Deconstruction in Antifantasy

In Peter and Wendy, the narrator frequently appears in front of the reader. For example, when the story shifts to Neverland, the narrator addresses the reader and says: “Observe how they pass over fallen twigs without making the slightest noise.” (p. 55) The narrator also speaks to the reader putting on airs: “When they have passed, comes the last figure of all, a gigantic crocodile. We shall see for whom she is looking presently.” (p. 55-6) And assuming an intimate air, he calls out to the reader. “At once the lost boys -- but where are they? They are no longer there. Rabbits could not have disappeared more quickly. I will tell you where they are.” (p. 56) There are countless examples of such a talkative narrator appearing in front of the reader. However, the author’s method of speaking to the reader in the work itself is not new. If you think about it, the simplest form of narrative would have been that the narrator told his or her experiences to his neighbor. Like the narrator of a folk fairy tale, the author participates in the progress of the story as one of the characters. Furthermore, when folklore fairy tales were told, many of the listeners often knew the content of the story in advance. The narrator must have been aware that he was working on a story about a ready-made fact that had already been accepted by the listener as a myth or legend. The subject matter being told, and the mode of narrative were tacit agreements between the narrator and the listener. This mechanism of information-sharing consciousness can be pointed out throughout the story of Peter and Wendy. Many readers were familiar with the story of Peter Pan, a well-received play that had been staged seven years before the publication of the novel Peter and Wendy. Perhaps because both the author Barrie and the readers of this novel at the time had experienced repeated performances of Peter Pan, the events narrated in Peter and Wendy are often treated as matters that have already been agreed upon by the author and the reader. Similar to fairy tales passed down by the folk people, the act of its reading is carried out in a situational setting of retelling. However, it is also a fact that there is a particular structure in Peter and Wendy that goes beyond the usual mechanism of retelling, in which the author goes beyond his authority as a play-by-play reporter for one of the characters, and is more actively involved in the progress of the story.　　　For example, when introducing the reader to Hook for the first time, the author begins by saying, “Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook’s method.” The author is clearly self-conscious about the way in which the world of the work is presented when working on the fictional world. Naturally, the narrator is provided with the authority to manipulate the development of the narrative world as he pleases. In addition, the narrator is the only person in the work who is free from textual constraints, placing himself outside the flow of time that proceeds within the world of the work. The day the Darling children leave the house is described as follows:

The opportunity came a week later, on that never-to-be-forgotten Friday. Of course it was a Friday. “I ought to have been specially careful on a Friday,” she used to say afterwards to her husband,...


The consciousness of time in which past and future depicted in the story are equalized as the content of the same legend, can be seen here. The effect of temporal fluidity on the process of reconstructing the narrative world in the reader’s mind brought about by the narrative manipulation was a typical example of the modernist style. It was also a method often tried by the novelist William Faulkner, who later led the modernist trend as one of the Lost Generation writers. In Faulkner’s case, the work of creating a myth was carried out by highlighting the existence of a pseudo-legendary history called the Yoknapatawpha saga that underlies each work. In the case of Barrie, on the other hand, he referred to the information disclosed in the play Peter Pan, which had previously been staged by his own hands, as a legendary fact for the novel Peter and Wendy, and opened up a space for presenting new literary work through the mechanism of retelling the legend. Conversely, it can be said that the novel Peter and Wendy mythologized the content of the play Peter Pan. Faulkner has brought his method of storytelling to the forefront of the creative act as a new experimental technique, but in the case of Barrie, the artifice is even more subtle because it is carried out in a modest and casual manner.