The Rise of the Byronic Narrator in Childe Harold II

Abstract

This paper traces the origin of the Byronic narrator, whose digressive and inconsistent voice has been an integral part in Byron’s poetics. Concerning the first two Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, discussions on the Byronic narrator have been scanty and limited compared to the Byronic hero, while the poem is rather reticent about the eponymous hero. I suggest that the Byronic narrator emerges in Albanian stanzas in Canto II of Childe Harold. To be more specific, Byron’s visit to the Oriental despot Ali Pasha in Tepeleni and subsequent fortuitous encounter with the Suliotes—the natives of the land of Suli who had fought against Ali Pasha from 1790 through 1802, later to be defeated, massacred, and exiled by him in 1803—are the pivotal moments that dissociate the narrator from both the hero and the poet. I argue that his experiences in Albania induced a mode of sympathy for the oppressed, and the poet’s (and the hero’s) unbridled joy in the virtue of the Suliotes as a noble savage has the narrator exhibit his skeptical voice that creates textual ruptures. This essay claims the relevance between this flexible mode of poetic voicing and Byron’s own radical politics that would be also marked by its flippancy and forgetfulness.