The Reader's Pilgrimage : Narration and Textual Levels in 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to investigate the narrative structure of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, with particular interest in its relation to the genre of the novel in verse, the first example of which is Byron’s Don Juan. As has been noted for instance by Hermann Fischer and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák1, although Childe Harold itself is not a true novel in verse itself, it contains many traits that will be fully developed in Don Juan, thus it is one of the most important predecessors of the genre. One key feature of Childe Harold is unquestionably the importance of the narrator: the figure thereof becomes overwhelmingly important in the text; furthermore, there is an intricate interdependency to be observed in the relation of the hero, the narrator, and the author. From the reader’s point of view, this is mostly perceived as the loss of clear-cut boundaries among these figures. Apart from this, a second aspect that has to be considered is that there are several layers of the text: besides the cantos written in verse (the core text), there are a number of notes written by Byron (later of course also by the editors such as Murray), not to mention the prefaces that also contain Byron’s comments. These are not only of a mere explanatory purpose but cause a certain playfulness in the text, forcing the reader to shift between the individual levels from time to time.