Student Question

Who is the narrator in Hard Times?

Quick answer:

In Hard Times, Dickens uses a third-person, largely omniscient narrator who tells the reader what is going on, sets the scene, and describes the thoughts of various characters.

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Like a good Victorian novelist would, Dickens uses a highly knowledgeable third-person narrator who looks down from "above" and can speak with authority about what is going on in the novel. There is some scholarly debate as to whether this narrator is fully omniscient, as he sometimes claims not to know what is on a character's mind, but in the broadest sense the speaker is omniscient: he explains not only what is happening but what various characters are thinking. For example, he lets us know that Harthouse is not proud of himself for his good deed of resigning from Bounderby and Gradgrind after his elopement plans unravel:

A secret sense of having failed and been ridiculous—a dread of what other fellows who went in for similar sorts of things, would say at his expense if they knew it—so oppressed him, that what was about the very best passage in his life was the one of all others he would not have owned to on any account, and the only one that made him ashamed of himself.

The narrator also gets inside the heads of Louisa and others at the end of the novel. He asks, seemingly with limited omniscience,

But, how much of the Future [could Louisa see]?

But it is also possible that the narrator knows what Louisa's future is and is simply not sharing.

The narrator shows omniscience as he sets up scenes for us, such as describing Coketown at the beginning of the novel or pronouncing moral judgments on events.

In a more subjective narration, we would see the same events and settings through the limited perspective of one (or a few) characters. We would perceive Coketown, for instance, as it appeared to Louisa or Sissy or Mr. Gradgrind. But this is not the choice Dickens makes: his narrator speaks from above and his words are authoritative.

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