Multiperspectival Narration: The Perspective Structure of Charles Dickens´ "Bleak House" and George Eliot´s "Middlemarch‪"‬

The idea that knowledge is always perspectival, that every understanding is subjective and dependent on an observer, and that by a multiperspectival way of looking at a thing, our notion of this object, our objectivity becomes more extensive and more complex has become a common-place idea. According to the German philosopher’s, Nietzsche’s philosophical theory, termed perspectivism, “there are no immaculate perceptions”, and “knowledge from no point of view is as incoherent a notion as seeing from no particular vantage point” . As Berndt Magnus puts it, “perspectivism also denies the possibility of an all-inclusive perspective, which could contain all others and, hence, make reality available as it is in itself”. [...]
These views about the limits of human understanding and perspectivism were not developed in the field of literature, but in the field of philosophy. However, since the eighteenth century, through the development of innovative narrative forms the novel has had a very important role in making people aware of the fact that all experience, understanding and even history is bound to a person’s subjectivity. As Vera & Ansgar Nünning state in their article, the relationship between narration and perspectivity, or rather the subjectivity of experiencing reality (“Subjektabhängigkeit von Wirklichkeitserfahrung”) is especially clear in the case of multiperspectival narration, because in these narratives several versions of the same events are presented side by side, and thus in such multiperspectival narratives, the emphasis shifts from the narrated events to the mode of experiencing reality. Besides, they add that by contrasting the different descriptions and interpretations there is a constant relativization of the imperfect points of view and of the norms and values of the different individuals, from whose perspective we learn the story while reading the narrative. Therefore, in their view, multiperspectivally narrated novels are suitable to present the diversity of different social viewpoints, ideas, and social discourses.
The first study that provides a precise terminological framework for the analysis of multiperspectival narration is Vera & Ansgar Nünning’s groundbreaking work, in which they apply Manfred Pfister’s theories for the analysis of the different character perspectives in drama.