various theories concerning the identity of the narrator

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

• The narrator is an omniscient nineteenth-century novel narrator.
  
• The narrator is Susanna Clarke writing in the real world.
  
• There are two layers of fiction here, of which we see only one. The narrator isn’t actually omniscient, and the book that we have is a potentially inaccurate reconstructed account of historical events in the ‘real’ world of the story, written probably 20-30 years after the events it relates. This seems to be fairly popular, and if we allow that the novel exists within its own universe it’s probably the most plausible, but I find it unsatisfying — I don’t want to think that the story isn’t what ‘really’ happened, and certainly there are things in there that no in-universe author could have known about.
  
• The narrator is a fictional character and the book exists in its own universe, but it is an entirely reliable and truthful portrayal of events. As to how this could happen, perhaps some mid-nineteenth-century magician somehow managed to use magic to see into both the past and other people’s heads and write the book that way, or there could simply be a character who really does know everything (in a universe that contains John Uskglass and apparently various sorts of supernatural beings I don’t think this is necessarily impossible, although why any such being would want to write a book is a little more obscure).
  
• The narrator is Miss Redruth (possibly along with either or both of her sisters). Potentially this means there is no Jane Eyre in the JSMN universe, but it’s a really interesting alternative.
• I actually think there’s good reason to speculate that the book is the work of more than one person. In particular, the main narration and the footnotes seem to be written from different perspectives: the narrator is (or at least presents herself as) omniscient, while the footnoter with their uncertain historical reconstuctions seems not to be. I mean, this fits fairly well in the ‘unreliable account’ theory if the narrator simply drops the pretence of omniscience in the footnotes, but it’s interesting to take this as the real state of things and theorise from there. Perhaps the novel is a found document of mysterious origin that some helpful in-universe scholar edited and footnoted before publishing it.

Tags: aimless speculation, my actual headcanon is a combination of the first two with occasional wanderings into the last one