Purpose of the Multiple Narrators in Nicole Krauss’s the History of Love

William Beaulieu

Alison Tett

The Novel

27 oct. 2016

Purpose of the Multiple Narrators in Nicole Krauss’s The history of Love

    The History of Love is a novel about novels. Nicole Krauss uses several first-person narrators and one omniscient narrator to show how novels let readers experience characters’s lives from the inside, how people’s lives are connected and how ultimately novels can give readers a « God’s eye » view of existence. First argument will be about how the three first-person are connected to the purpose of the novel, the second one will be about the dramatic irony that is created by those narrators and finally, the last one will be about the exaggerating presence of the omniscient narrator in Zvi Litvinoff chapters.

    Like most novels, one of the objectives of The History of Love is to let readers experience what it is like to be in the head of somebody else, and to show the connections between people and events. The author integrates three different narrators to bring three different points of view in the novel. Leo Gursky is the first narrator to be introduced in the story. He’s an old Jewish Polish nobcaust survivor who has been through a lot in his life. The type of narration used for Leo is open, honest and laid bare. Also, his narration moves freely during the whole novel. In the novel, there are a lot of flashbacks of the most important events in his life. For example, when he refers to the memories of the time before world war II, it is as if he has one foot in the past and one in the present. All those memories influence his writing and narration style. He’s grateful for the time he has left and he’s able to preserve his thoughts in writing even if he’s an old man. Alma Singer is the second narrator to be introduced in the novel. She’s a fifteen-year-old urban teenager searching for mysterious Eastern Europeans who might not actually exist, and keeping a detailed notebook called « How to survive in the wild . » Alma is very much the energetic life force behind the book. If Leo is largely concerned with growing old and dying, Alma is concerned with growing up. The age of Alma plays a very important role in the type of narrator she is. Her type of narration is confused, excited, hesitant, volatile, overwhelmed, and imaginative, just like she is. As for Emmanuel Chaim Singer aka Bird, he’s the third narrator. Bird is Alma’s young brother. Everyone calls him « Bird » because of his attempting to fly by jumping off a building. Bird was born Jewish and became a observant Jew at nine years old and declared that he’s a « lamed vovnik » which, in Jewish scripture, is one of the thirty-six people in  the world who may become the Messiah. Compared to his sister, who’s in search for identity and quiet grief, Bird tries his best to connect to his heritage and his father, through religion.

    There’s a dramatic irony in The History of Love because the fact that there are three first-person narrators leads to it. Readers come to understand the truth before the character do. Leo was writing the manuscript of The History of Love, something we do not discover until the end of the novel. In a passage, Leo says that he didn’t write about real things and he didn’t write imaginary things. He wrote about the only thing he knew. He continued to fill pages with her name. What we understand is that what Leo knows is the love he has for Alma. The fragments of the representational register of the manuscript of The History of Love that we see in the novel are signs to know the truth. The truth is that Leo actually wrote The History of Love. It is a blending of the real and the imaginary, an in-between reality and fantasy register. the type of writing that rosa uses in the introduction of Leo’s novel is both beautiful imprecise and inexact regarding the facts and realities of avi, but the type is well used to evoke the truth about who he was. Rosa invites the reader to see everything through Zvi’s eyes. Also, readers see the irony of Bird completely misunderstanding the events bus nevertheless bringing Leo and Alma together. he is a little bit strange and crazy as he constantly thinks that he might be the Messiah and he can’t stop picking his nose with his arm around his face.