SOURCE: "Jim Hawkins and the Faintly Inscribed Reader in Treasure Island," in Cahiers Victoriens and Edouardiens, No. 40, October, 1994, pp. 37-47.

[In the following essay, Sutton examines the tone and style of the narrative voice of Treasure Island. He argues that Stevenson employed confessional techniques through which he "invites the reader to become a friend, a partner in [a] relationship between equals."]

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful passage I remember to have read by any modern author, "two to speak truth—one to speak and one to hear."

Stevenson, "Truth of Intercourse" (1879)¹

Many readers have felt the power of Treasure Island, but no one can quite explain it. Who could account for the effect upon an eight-year-old boy who begged to read one more chapter at bedtime and then, before the lights went out, asked his parents to take the book downstairs? Much as he loved this masterpiece, he did not want to sleep in the same room with it. When Stevenson himself tried explaining the power of good adventure stories, he spoke of "brute incident" and "epoch-making scenes," as when the hero strings his bow in "the best of romances," The Odyssey.² Yet he acknowledged a force outside the text in boys like himself who "dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles."³Treasure Island undoubtedly whets this appetite—and gratifies it when Jim Hawkins eavesdrops on the pirates or confronts Israel Hands on the deck of the Hispaniola. But more than brute incident draws the reader into Jim's experiences. If action were everything, the book would lose nothing when dramatized on film, and no film version yet has recreated the basic condition for communicating experience: an open, trusting relationship between narrator and audience. "We can trust Jim Hawkins,"⁴ wrote a Victorian reader, and upon this trust much of the power of the story depends. Were we to doubt Jim's essential truthfulness, even the greatest scenes would fail to draw us "clean out of ourselves" and into the world of the tale. ⁵

To create a bond with the reader, Stevenson not only made Jim likeable; he also wrote a perceptive, sympathetic reader into the text. The role is there for us to fill, even as we identify with the young hero. Represented by an unspecified "you," the faintly inscribed reader keeps us close to Jim the narrator. "You" becomes a sign of shared confidence, a welcome signal that he is keeping us in mind. In his effort to tell "the whole particulars of the expedition"⁶ (except the location of the island), he needs a sympathetic audience if he wants to communicate more about his experience than a mere catalogue of events. For telling anything close to the full truth is, as Stevenson and Thoreau believed, a cooperative undertaking, with "one to speak and one to hear." In daily conversation, this difficult task requires both an honest, expressive speaker and a receptive listener. Stevenson found the best conditions for truth-telling in friendship and love, since any hostility or doubt can distort the message: "A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects" as would our postmodern "hermeneutics of suspicion."

What he believed about truth-telling in daily life has important implications for the relationship between narrator and inscribed reader in his fiction. In "Truth of Intercourse," he implies an analogy by discussing the task of an author: "The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish" (p.93). In the realm of fictional truth, a narrator needs some of the resources of a speaker in ordinary life. Both depend upon "this difficult art of literature," and according to their "proficiency in this art shall be the freedom and fulness of their intercourse" with others. Speaking or writing, a narrator cannot succeed by forfeiting his "birthright of expression" and cultivating "artful intonations" that mask himself and pervert "his means of communication with his fellow men". To become an expressive personal presence, a fictional author needs the assets of a truthful speaker: a "responsive voice," the "gift of frank, explanatory speech," something comparable to a "lively and not a stolid countenance," as well as "such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos". If Jim Hawkins, Huckleberry Finn, and David Balfour win our friendship and trust, they do so partly because as storytellers they reveal many of the gifts that Stevenson found essential for truth-telling in daily life. Avoiding "artful intonations," they write with a style and tone that seems natural to them and expressive of their personalities.

But does Jim Hawkins really have a personality to express? Jenni Calder has described him as a "neutral unformed hero" who comes back from his adventures "none the worse and none the better." Because he "has so little personality," she believes that children may have trouble identifying with him. Long John Silver remains with us as the hero, while Jim "slides out of memory."⁷ Whether or not this claim holds true for many other memories besides Calder's own, Stevenson faced a challenge in making Jim a credible, self-expressive narrator. If, as he believed, children "do not see themselves at all"⁸ and "the essence and charm" of youth "is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life,"⁹ how could a boy in narrating his story reveal the self that he has not yet come to know? If he reveals himself unconsciously, with complete naiveté, can he be trustworthy at the same time? A naive narrator is not normally considered a reliable one, although Huck Finn invites trust in almost everything but his attempt to judge his own moral conduct. Other novelists before Twain and Stevenson—Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre, Dickens in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, Blackmore in Lorna Doone, Meredith in Harry Richmond—solved the problem by letting adult narrators report the ordeals of their childhood and youth. Stevenson would follow these examples with David Balfour in Kidnapped and Catriona, in which the seventeen-year-old boy at the start of his adventures turns out to be a father when he writes his story. He has had plenty of time to develop a personality.

Jim's age is harder to pin down, and for many readers the fictional author of Treasure Island still seems to be a child—a "boy narrator," according to David Daiches.¹⁰ A reviewer in 1883 called it "the narrative of the boy Jim Hawkins"; "a story told by the child hero," writes Jacqueline Rose a century later.¹¹ J. R. Hammond asserts that the "bulk of the story is narrated by a boy" who gives "a child's vision of the world."¹² Because Jim is a cabin boy in the story (fourteen-years old in the serial version),¹³ Robert Kiely assumes that he is still a boy when he writes, leaving "the imperfect memory of a boy" as our only source of narrative authority.¹⁴ According to this view, Jim no sooner returned to England than he sat down to write, suddenly transformed with no further schooling into a master stylist, able to produce the elegant flowing sentence that fills his opening paragraph.

Against the prevailing assumption of the narrator's immaturity, Barbara Wall has recently claimed that Jim writes as an adult looking back on his boyhood.¹⁵ The evidence that she could cite (but does not) provides strong support for her position. Aside from the obvious fact of his stylistic maturity, Jim repeatedly indicates that some time has elapsed since the voyage was over. Without supplying the dates that would show how many years have passed, he begins by saying that he must "go back" in time to the start of the action; later he explains his apparently rash decision to slip away from the stockade by writing, "I was only a boy," as if he were a boy no longer. At the end he reports that the loyal sailor Gray "not only had saved his money, but . . . also studied his profession, and he is now mate and part owner of a . . . ship; married besides, and the father of a family." All this would have taken time, so Jim must be over twenty when he writes if he was fourteen when the action begins. In a recent "memory play" by Ara Watson he is a young man looking backward in search of the meaning of his grand adventure, "when innocence was lost to him forever."¹⁶ Definitely he is not the "boy" or "child" that some readers have imagined narrating of the story. Admittedly, as a young man he still might suffer from the ignorance of self and of life that Stevenson considered characteristic of youth. But a dramatic early initiation could make him an exception to Stevenson's rule and enable him to look back upon his boyhood with the self-knowledge gained from harsh experience.

If the narrator is an adult, does he write for readers who are adults as well? Insofar as he tries to set down an account that will satisfy Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey, he has grown-ups in mind even as he addresses a "you" who never set foot on the island. Although different from the squire and the doctor, the reader that Jim writes into the text has to share their adult roles in responding to the narrative. The actual reader may be a child, like Stevenson's twelve-year-old stepson, who first heard the chapters read aloud by the author, or the not particularly impressed subscribers who first read the story in Young Folks in 1881. But the ages of actual readers do not affect the nature of the "you" in the text or disprove Wall's claim that Stevenson's "narratee was never a child". Any actual child who reads is being addressed as an adult and given the same role as those other "gentlemen" who joined Livesey and Trelawney in asking Jim to write a full account of the adventure.

Henry James pictured a different narrative situation. For him the primary audience is the "young reader" whose presence and "state of mind" become part of the adult's experience in reading the story, looking, as it were, over the boy's shoulder, with an avuncular arm "around his neck."¹⁷ Aptly as this image reflects the dual appeal of Treasure Island to many men as well as boys, it tells more about actual readers than it does about the fictional one in the text. To account for her sense that the narratee is an adult, Wall invokes the concept of the "implied reader" to name the presence that James saw peering over the young reader's shoulder. But there is no need for this abstract construct when an unspecified "you" recurs in the text. Jim gives his reader credit for having the sympathies and the intelligence of any perceptive person, child or adult. Wanting the reader to pay attention, he writes "you will remember" that Trelawney is the squire's name, although thirty pages have gone by since he first mentioned it. Jim also expects deeper acts of attention, particularly concerning the vanity and the gullibility that he now sees in his younger self. Wall's claim that he "does not look at himself with irony" will not stand against the evidence, nor will Robert Kiely's statement that the narration lacks any "trace of wit or irony."¹⁸ After reporting the boy's susceptibility to flattery from Long John Silver, does Jim not see—and expect his reader to see—the irony of his indignation inside the apple barrel when Silver recruits a young mutineer?

You may imagine how I felt when I heard the abominable old rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he used to myself. I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him through the barrel.

If Jim as narrator misses the irony, why did he prepare us for it by reporting his previous opinion that Silver "was one of the best of possible shipmates"?

In revealing the sensitive ego of his boyhood self, he invites not only a smile at his sudden reversal of opinion but also our sympathy (we have sensitive egos too) and our trust in him as one who will deal honestly with "the whole particulars" of his experience, even when he looks a bit ridiculous. In effect, he invites the reader to become a friend, a partner in the relationship between equals that Stevenson believed was essential for truthful communication. Because "truth to fact is not always truth to sentiment" ("Truth of Intercourse,"), Jim must represent not only the events but also his feelings. His first reference to the reader comes with his first report of fear, aroused in this instance by looking out for a one-legged man: "How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you". Soon afterward when he writes, "I was very uneasy and alarmed, as you may fancy", he clearly expects the reader to share his response—to be sympathetic and imaginative enough to stand in the boy's shoes or cower inside the barrel when Silver asks Dick to fetch an apple: "You may fancy the terror I was in!"

Jim further expects the reader to share his values and to make judgments upon certain characters. "You would have thought men would have been ashamed of themselves," he comments when telling how the men of the hamlet refused to protect the widow and her son at the "Admiral Benbow". In reporting his own misper-ceptions and impulsive actions, he invites critical (and sometimes amused) judgments upon himself. After showing how fooled he was by Silver's flattering tongue, he reveals another misperception in his early response to Captain Smollett, who offends the boy by saying, "'I'll have no favourites on my ship.'" Emphasizing the boy's childishness, Jim ends the chapter with his petty reaction: "I assure you I was quite of the squire's way of thinking, and hated the captain deeply". He expects more criticism of his younger self when telling of his most questionable decision—to slip out of the stockade on a mission of his own devising: "I was a fool, if you like, and certainly I was going to do a foolish, over-bold act; but I determined to do it with all the precautions in my power". His word for this desertion is "folly," even though in retrospect he can write that it was "a help toward saving all of us", a statement eventually confirmed by Dr. Livesey's praise: "'Every step, it's you that saves our lives.'"

By inviting criticism and reporting his feelings along with the events, Jim sounds trustworthy. Certainly we feel the truth of his emotional responses. If his story has given boys bad dreams for over a century, at least the narrator himself is a fellow sufferer. As James Wilson notes, it is his own "recurring nightmare" that Jim "has communicated, with hypnotizing eloquence, to the reader."¹⁹ This legacy from the quest is spelled out in his last sentence: "Oxen and wain-ropes would not drag me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: 'Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!" In the story, he hears that voice most nightmarishly upon stumbling in the dark back to the blockhouse, expecting to find his friends inside, only to be greeted by the call of Silver's green parrot. This time he has no need to name his response, and the "horror" that he mentions soon afterward comes mainly from seeing no sign of any prisoners. That feeling does not stop him from sizing up the situation, counting his enemies, and noting their symptoms of drunkenness. By now, having killed Israel Hands and recaptured the ship, he is well on his way toward surviving a hero's initiation, complete with an initiatory wound from the pirate's dirk and a moment of initiatory death when he imagined his body "falling from the cross-trees into that still green water, beside the body of the coxswain" (p. 143). His recovery from the "horror" of picturing his own death marks a symbolic resurrection (as his first being pinned to the mast above the cross-trees might suggest)—a sign that his legacy from the voyage is more than a recurring nightmare.

The legacy includes the heroic virtues of courage and honor, shown the day after his confrontation with death on the ship when he turns down the chance to flee with Dr. Livesey and keeps his promise to stay with Silver. These virtues and what he learns about himself on the voyage inform the adult personality of the narrator, whose integrity and discipline appear in his straightforward, rigorously focused yet sensitive way of telling his story. Granted, he has undergone nothing as profound as a conversion and had no vision to give his life ultimate direction and purpose. In Watson's memory play, all he comes to realize is the exact moment with Silver when he lost his childhood innocence. Anyone who wishes that Jim had learned more may be disappointed to read in the last chapter that sorting all those gold coins was unsurpassed among the boy's pleasures. Frank McLynn here sees a clear sign that money is the "ruling principle" in a story that lacks a "moral centre";²⁰ by implication, Jim has been corrupted along with Dr. Livesey and the Squire. But to accept that view is to overlook Jim's closing words about the "accursed island" and his act of putting promise-keeping above personal safety when he refuses to flee with Livesey. To agree with Jenni Calder that he comes home "none the worse and none the better" is to ignore the courage, honor, and more confident sense of identity that he develops and reveals during his initiation. If nothing else, it is to ignore the growth in awareness and sensibility that enables him to tell such an engaging story.

Because he has passed demanding tests and ordeals, Jim as protagonist bolsters the authority of Jim as narrator. The rites of passage qualify him as a person to respect and trust, even as his openness and his consciousness of the reader make him approachable, a narrator whose company we enjoy even if he does pass on a few nightmares. By sharing his fears, he never becomes so exalted a hero that he seems alien to those of us who have led quieter lives. If some readers agree with Barbara Wall that Jim "builds up no comfortable confiding relationship with his narratee", the reason may lie simply in the harrowing nature of his experiences and not in his supposedly "abiding sense of disillusion". Stevenson himself took pains in revising the serial version to make Jim all the more likeable—more sympathetic and less boastful.²¹ Certainly by comparison with the other narrator, Dr. Livesey (whose image was also improved in the revision), Jim is more open about his feelings and in closer touch with his readers. Livesey says very little about his emotions and never addresses the reader. We feel more comfortable with Jim.

Yet Wall's sense of distance from him does have a discernible basis in the text. Compared to the narratees in Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Barchester Towers, or Middlemarch, the reader in Treasure Island is only faintly inscribed, a figure never identified by age, gender, or occupation. Jim never pauses for more than a sentence to address the unspecified "you" of his imagining, and in the last chapter this figure virtually disappears. The framework of communication between fictional author and reader is fragile throughout and left open at the end. Given Stevenson's ideas about what happens in reading romantic fiction, the frame must be left fragile enough to give way at crucial moments so the actual reader can "plunge into the tale" in his own person, abandoning the reader's role to play at "being the hero" ("A Gossip on Romance").

"Frames are meant to be forgotten," one critic of Wuthering Heights has said,²² and Stevenson's practice illustrates this principle, even at a time when other yarnspinners were starting to focus on the frame by dramatizing the act of storytelling. In 1881 when Treasure Island appeared in Young Folks, the Manx poet T. E. Brown (an admired older friend of Stevenson's friend W. E. Henley) brought out his first collection of "Fo'c's'le Yarns," giving the shipboard listeners a vocal part in a sailor's narrations. Before the decade ended, Kipling was also imitating oral storytelling in stories of soldiers in India, and Conrad would go on with this technique in "Youth" and "Heart of Darkness." Unlike these writers, Stevenson generally avoided imitating the give-and-take of oral narration, and in his best-known representation of spoken storytelling, "Thrawn Janet" (1881), the audience stays shadowy and indistinct, a vague "ye" on the last page. Even here he keeps the frame as thin as possible, making sure that no inscribed listener will come between the actual reader and the "ghastly story" that, as he said, frightened him to death. ²³

Where specified readers do appear in his first-person narratives, in at least two cases their identities are kept discreetly in the background. Four chapters into "The Pavilion on the Links" (1880), a reference to "your mother" reveals that the narrator is writing for his own children; in Catriona (1892-93), the long-delayed sequel to Kidnapped (1886), David Balfour waits until the end to address his children after writing "you" in the most general way everywhere else. Compared to the readers inscribed in Kidnapped and Treasure Island, the ones in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) have more definite functions because old Mackellar undertakes to present his testimony "like a witness in court." The readers will be judges.²⁴ But since they will not see his documents until a century later, their identities can hardly be specified.

To account for Stevenson's reluctance to write the reader more distinctly into his texts, we might reconsider Robert Kiely's view of his protagonists. They are underdeveloped, Kiely thinks, because the author "wants no hero . . . to be so carefully and elaborately described that his personality or his sex comes between the reader and narrative incident . . . The disposition of every protagonist must be . . . vaguely enough realized so that at the appropriate moment of crisis, the reader can ignore him and 'enter' the plot himself. By neglecting their roles as adult narrators. Kiely may underestimate the degree of characterization found in David Balfour and Jim Hawkins, who express their personalities on two levels, not simply as protagonists. As the teller of his own story, Jim reveals enough of himself—his integrity and his respect for his imagined reader—to participate in something like the difficult process that Stevenson described in "Truth of Intercourse." But if Kiely's view somewhat oversimplifies the fictional authors, it might well be applied to the generalized "you" in these stories. The vague pronoun in Treasure Island draws us into the narrator's confidence, keeping us almost at his elbow as he writes the story. Yet our inscription in the text is faint enough that at any moment we may take another role—the frightening but still satisfying one of the vulnerable, resourceful boy in the thick of perilous adventures.

Notes

¹ "Truth of Intercourse" in The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, introduction by Jeremy Treglown (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), p. 98. Further page references will be given in the text. Henry David Thoreau's sentence comes from "Wednesday" in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1893), p. 352.

² "A Humble Remonstrance," in The Lantern-Bearers, p. 193.

³ "A Gossip on Romance," in The Lantern-Bearers, p. 172.

⁴ S. R. Crockett, quoted in Diana Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 133.

⁵ "A Gossip," pp. 172, 179.

⁶Treasure Island, ed. Emma Letley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 1. Further page references will be given in the text.

⁷Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 173.

⁸ Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 61.

⁹ "A Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art," in The Lantern-Bearers, p. 224.

¹⁰Robert Louis Stevenson and His World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 56.

¹¹ Arthur John Butler in the Athenaeum (1 Dec. 1883), in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, ed. Paul Maixner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 130; Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Literature(London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 79-80, quoted with no disagreement on this point by Loxley, p. 147. For another reader who believes that "the boy-protagonist" tells the story, see Harold Francis Watson, Coasts of Treasure Island (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor Company, 1969), p. 132. Hayden W. Ward makes the same assumption in "'The Pleasure of Your Heart': Treasure Island and the Appeal of Boy's Adventure Fiction," Studies in Fiction, 6 (1974): 308.

¹²A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Essays, and Short Stories (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 103.

¹³ See Letley's "Eplanatory Notes," Treasure Island, p. 209.

¹⁴ Kiely, Stevenson and Fiction, p. 69.

¹⁵The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). p. 70. Further page references will be given in the text. See also Reinbert Tabbert. "Lockende Kinderbucheingänge," Wirkendes Wort, 36 (1986): 433. Tabbert reads Jim's first sentence as making a clear distinction between the time of writing and the time of the events in the story: as narrator he probably would be more mature (reifer), having become the trusted friend of those gentlemen who ask him to write this account.

¹⁶Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, adapted by Ara Watson (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1991), p. 7.

¹⁷ "Robert Louis Stevenson," quoted in Ward, "'The Pleasure of Your Heart'." pp. 304-05.

¹⁸ Kiely does add "—not as Mark Twain understood those words" (p.68). But he does not explain how Twain understood wit and irony.

¹⁹ "Landscape with Figures," in Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Andrew Noble (London and Totowa, N. J.: Vision Press and Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), p. 93.

²⁰ Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 199.

²¹ See Letley, Introduction to Treasure Island, p. xvii, and David Angus, "Youth on the Prow: The First Publication of Treasure Island," Studies in Scottish Literature, 25 (1990): 86-87.

²² John T. Matthews, "Framing in Wuthering Heights," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 27 (1985): 25.

²³Robert Louis Stevenson: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Peter Stoneley (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991), p. 315.

²⁴The Master of Ballantrae, ed. Emma Letley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 20.