The Narrator's Persona in "Piers Plowman B".

This study describes patterns in Piers Plowman B that explain the apparently self-contradictory behavior manifested by its narrator. Many students of the poem simply identify its first person with its author, even though the narrator often presents events from the dreamer's limited viewpoint, fails to provide a rectifying gloss during crucial scenes (e.g. Theology's defense of Mede in Passus II), and sometimes beclouds the plot while attempting to clarify it. Perhaps the most notorious instance of this last type of behavior appears in Passus VII, where the narrator's detailed account of Truth's pardon, listing the stipulations inscribed in the margin of the document, is evidently denied by the spare Latin of the pardon which Piers unfolds. Nevertheless, the narrator does comment in earnest on dire social troubles, condemns sinful conduct, urges piety, makes prophecies, and narrates with great skill and devotion his visions of Christ's life. Surely so talented a poet as Langl and does not raise the jester's mask, then the prophet's, capriciously; he must have designed his narrator according to some pattern that would support the emotional and spiritual development of his poem. The study first describes the judgmental ambiguities that plague the narrative method of the poem from its earliest lines, and , linking these difficulties with key linguistic features, demonstrates the possibility of shifting styles within one narrative voice over the course of the poem. The study then examines probable models or anti-models which Langl and might have used in constructing his first person. Because Piers is at least a fictive autobiography, and because Will misquotes a line from Augustine's Confessions during his foolish refutation of Scripture in Passus X, Langl and invites both generic and specific comparisons between these two works. Will's performance as a narrator appears woefully confused and inadequate in relation to Augustine's confession, at least until the visions of Christ late in the poem. Thus, the narrator in Piers seems to evolve, or to comprise a series of sub-personae which Langl and solders into a shifting first-person. The historical probability of this thesis is then supported by a brief history of first-person narration in selected Old French poetry prior to 1350, suggesting how Langl and might have been influenced, directly or indirectly, when constructing his first person. While these chapters show the purposeful fallibility of Langl and 's narrator in much of Piers, a comparison of Will's vision of Christ with Meditation On the Life of Christ shows how the narration of Christ's life in Piers is charged with a theological and figurative underst and ing that the narrator lacks in earlier Passus. Finally, textual analysis of the narrator's sustained intrusions proves them to be significant bench marks in plotting his spiritual and artistic ascent from a dim-witted scolder of his readers to an enlightened author who reveals theological mysteries and contemplates his own supernatural end. The study ends with a concluding review, and suggests further problems that warrant investigation.Ph.D.British and Irish literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158330/1/8116318.pd