Engaging Strategies in Adam Bede

One of the narrative strategies employed in different ways by men and women writers is the presentation of narrator. The significance of narrator is so much that it differentiates between the realistic and non-realistic fiction and specifically men's and women's writings in realistic fiction. Robyn R Warhol's theory based on Genette's is applied to Adam Bede by George Eliot to focus on woman as writer. Warhol specifies five touchstones for distinguishing engaging and distancing narrators which consist of 1) The degree of irony present in references to the narratee; 2)The frequency of direct address to the narratee; 3)The names by which the narratee is addressed; 4)The narrator's stance toward the characters; 5)The narrator's implicit or explicit attitude towards the act of narration. These five touchstones are examined in Adam Bede to come to the conclusion about the nature of the narrator, whether engaging or distancing.