Slade House Blog 4: Who is telling the story?

As we finish David Mitchell’s Slade House, we turned our attention to an important question–who is telling us this story?  The Rhetoric of Narrative states that there must be a narrator (someone telling the story), an addressee (someone being told the story), and a relationship between the two (a reason for the narrator to address the addressee). By looking at the text through the context of the whole novel, we will be attempting to identify these elements. If you wish to read up on our other thoughts on Slade House, give our previous post a read.

Who’s narrating the story!?

Each chapter has presented us with a different narrator (Nathan, Gordon, Sally, Freya, and Norah) but are there really five different narrators? But the narrator must be telling an addressee these events from a hypothetical time and place, but most of the narrators are gone in every sense of the word. Nathan, Gordon, and Sally all had their souls devoured after being tricked into entering Slade House by the immortal twins, Norah and Jonah Grayer. After his soul is eaten, Nathan cuts off mid-sentence saying “The Nathan in the mirror is gone, and if he’s gone, I’m–” (36). Their fates transcend their story. When they end, so do the words on the page as there is no one left to narrate. Freya escaped, but she was not present when the previous victims spent their last day in Slade House. The only narrator who was there and makes it out of the story with her soul intact is Norah Grayer. Could Norah be the narrator? What is she, psychic? Well, yes. When Jonah, disguised as Fred Pink, tells all to Freya in part of his cat and mouse game in an imagined The Fox and Hounds Pub (or Orison as the twins call it), he explains that the twins possess the power of “telepathy” (151) and that “They could rummage through their clients’ minds and discover things no one knew, not even the people whose minds they were in” (163). She could read the mind of everyone who entered Slade House, like Nathan, Gordon, Sally, and Freya. And could, hypothetically, pass those thoughts along to us, the readers.

But she isn’t talking to us specifically. She’s talking to whoever she wants the reader to be. In Blog 1, we discussed how readers project their values and ideas onto a text when they read. Narrators can do the same thing. If Norah is telling the story, she will project whatever controlling value she wishes to win onto text. So naturally, when she is telling the story, Norah is projecting that her addressee will be persuaded to see things how she has presented them (also known as submitting to the text). She wants her addressee to believe the Orison she has created by constructing this story.

So who is Norah’s perfect addressee? If we believe that Norah is transmitting this story through telepathy, then whoever she is transmitting to must be capable of receiving the message in the first place. Who else is psychic in the book? It turns out, almost everyone. Jonah, as Fred Pink, reveals another key detail to Freya during their talk. The twins can only consume an “Engifted” to feed their lacuna, who is “a psychic, or a potential psychic” (177).  It would then make sense for Norah’s addressee to be an engifted as well.

The addressee after Norah describes the door

But engifted addressees come with a risk. All of their victims were capable of everything the twins do, which explains why their victims were able to begin to see through their Orison sometimes. For example, Nathan sees a woman mouthing words, possibly saying “‘No, no, no’ or ‘Go, go, go’” (21). Sally even finds the exit, breaking the illusion of a Halloween party the twins made when she sees “a small black iron door, exactly like the one is Slade Alley, only this one’s already ajar” (119). Their engifted-ness allows them to look closely and notice the strange, but their failure to reach farther and question what they see leads to their demise. As addressees, we are capable of the same. We notice when something seems off about Jonah asking Nathan about fears Jonah couldn’t have known of, or when Gordon sees Nathan’s portrait, or when Sally sees the iron door in the living room. But then we keep on reading the narrative and go back to just seeing the Orison as what it appears to us as, a story. The narrative is sucking us in like the twins suck victims into their illusions. Us (the addressee) failing to close read parallels the victims failing to examine Slade House closely, only to realize they are trapped. Norah’s chapter reveals how she toys with her addressee like she toys with her engifted victims. When she is luring Marinus into Slade House, while possessing Bombadil’s body, she says “‘It’s small, it’s black, it’s iron'” to Marinus, but thinks “I enjoy spelling out the obvious” (201). How many times has she told us about the small black iron door while she narrated? For each victim she describes the door to us, the addressee. She spells out the trap before us but we enter the door (the narrative) anyway! At this point, she is just showing off her tricks! Norah’s ideal addressee is an engifted, who can receive her telepathic Orison, maybe even notice the odd things within, but ultimately fall for her tricks.

Replace “Time Machine” with “Slade House”

But what is the reason she is telling the engifted addressee her story? Our group could not come to a consensus on this one.  The novel’s repetitive nature, retelling the same story of an engifted lured into an orison with a false story, and each victim being captured and consumed, lends itself to being a cautionary tale. Even the twins themselves ignore what’s right in front of them and are defeated by Marinus in the end. They too were engifted, albeit ones that strayed down a darker path. In this light the narrator is warning others to not make these same mistakes. They want the addressee to see the pattern before they are lead up the stairs. The story then becomes a cautionary tale told to engifted children in their beds. Or maybe its not to any engifted child, but to Norah herself in her new life after she enters the body of a fetus to escape death. She is in the baby’s body, telling herself about all the events that have past. She is recounting it all in present tense because it is coming back to her, and she is processing it all. She was growing old in her previous body and forgetting things. And now she is in a newborn’s body. By remembering all of these events and her goal of revenge at such a “young” age, she is effectively making  her mission her life’s goal. Whoever she is talking to specifically, the message is the same–assume nothing, and question everything because your life could depend on it.