Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:53 pm
It's not like the narrator suddenly changes style or something.
I'm unsure whether you and I disagree about the following, but there plainly are some who do.
The narrator is a character in the piece. There is no evidence that the narrator "is" the author, anymore than any other character "is" the author. It's like saying that
Moby Dick's Ishmael "is" Melville or that the Stage Manager in
Our Town "is" Thornton Wilder. (Then again, the narrator of
Atlas Shrugged probably
is Ayn Rand, lol.)
The Death of John is developed not only coherently with the work as a whole, but is in character for the narrator as well. Its introduction is a well motivated, timely remark about Jesus by Herod that calls for an explanation. The narrator obliges and warms to his task, just as he does when he feels the need to explain, at unnecessary length, what all this hand washing is about (which also has "nothing to do with Jesus"). Compare Winston Churchill, when an Egyptian locomotive broke down, explaining Islam, with the fall of the Roman Empire tossed in for good measure.
Some narrators digress. Mark's does, albeit on a short leash. It's a character trait.
Yes, that's a very good and accurate description of one important aspect of Mark's narrator, I think. That's what I meant. It's not like in Acts, where the narrator suddenly changes into a first person narrator. GMark has the exact same third person omnicient type of narrator all the way through, which is of course the most common type in narratives, but having such a narrator also means that the author has to make a huge amount of choices all the time, whether consciously or unconsciously: choosing when it's important to let know what the characters are feeling or thinking, when it's important
not to know it, when to comment, how to comment, how much to comment, choosing when to paraphrase what the characters say instead of them saying it in direct speech, etc. etc. The narrator in the Death of John exhibits exactly the same type and style as the rest of gMark, and to me it looks like a very consistent style of narration.
Further, I believe the invention of this kind of narrator by "Mark" might be viewed as his real original invention. It (this
exact type of narrator and narration) could possibly be seen as the defining characteristic of the 'gospel' genre (the four canonical gospels). This exact narrator is not invented by some collective effort in the early church with their 'traditions' which Mark then took over and only changed a little bit sometimes. The consistent style of this narrator, and the consistent way 'he' blends in with the characters of the story when it comes to using the same conceptual universe with the same motifs and the same 'code' words (e.g. "follow") etc., has to be the invention of a single mind. I'd surmise that the other evangelists took over this concept, but that it originated first with gMark.
For me (and this is perhaps a digression), one of the most interesting questions we can ask of gMark (once we come to believe that we're dealing with a unifed narrative), is:
How does God feel about the things that goes on in the story?
What is God thinking about these events?
What is God's attitude to all this?
God is also on the character list of the story, although he is very thoroughly
hidden ("there came a voice", 1:11, 9:7). Either the author of this whole story, "Mark", doesn't think this character (God) was very important and therefore doesn't have an opinion about what this particular character feels and thinks. Or else he consciously chooses not to treat this explicitly. The first option is impossible, I'd say. So the question remains: Why choose not to say anything explicit about the character God?
Like the epistles, they practically
only speak about what God thinks and feels about everything. In the gospels, it's the exact opposite (especially the synoptics).