THE NARRATOR’S VOICE: A NARRATOLOGICAL REAPPRAISAL OF APOSTROPHE IN VIRGIL’S AENEID

It has been said that an author’s ideological traces are apparent not only in the text’s open and direct evaluations but also in its silences, in what it subtracts from open view (Pugliatti 1985.203). In this article, I am interested in exploring how the persona of the narrator in the Aeneid is used to express the poet’s concerns about his political and poetic limitations by using the rhetorical space of apostrophe, i.e., where the fictional narrator talks directly to his characters. The Aeneid ascribes to politics the power of fashioning human history into a linear narrative, with Jupiter as the guarantor of its ultimate goodness,1 and I will argue that it is through the narrator’s state-ments, and silences, in apostrophe that Virgil tries to put this teleological approach in perspective. A main aim of my inquiry is to make a contribution to the debate over “whether Virgil’s ‘subjective style ’ ultimately produces a carefully controlled work with a unified viewpoint to which dissenting voices are carefully subordinated, or instead, offers as conflicting a plethora of voice