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Leacock's Narrative Voice by Cory Macleod, 2005.

If a story is being told, whether it is happening or has already happened, someone is responsible for its telling. The inescapable fact of narration is that words themselves are written by an author. In a fictional novel, and many other genres for that matter, an author may choose to narrate his story from a distanced perspective. Stephen Leacock chooses this mode of narration in his work, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Leacock�s narrator is omniscient, knowing every detail about Mariposa, including its history, its people, and its geography. The narrator speaks as if he has lived in Mariposa all his life, without directly coming out and saying so. As the narrator describes sketches in time, he accounts for his presence as the events come to pass, presenting the reader with his own opinion when he feels it necessary. The reader is taken on a walking tour of the town and introduced to countless residents and each of their individual lives. By closely examining the narrator�s comments, the reader learns more and more about him and how much he knows about the archetype of small town Ontario.

The introduction to Mariposa familiarizes the reader with the small town atmosphere which the novel is centered around. The narrator makes it clear that Mariposa is not a mystery if one knows Canada, ��for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it� (Leacock, 1). The omniscient narration continues to describe the geographical location of all the essential businesses in the town, such as the hotel, the pharmaceutical store, and the barber shop. Each of these businesses is referred to as the possession of its owner, such as Jeff Thorpe�s barber shop, indicating that the narrator is quite knowledgeable of the town and those who dwell there. It would be much harder to have such knowledge in a larger town, as Jeff Thorpe would surely not be the only one who owned a barber shop in a city such as modern day Toronto. In Mariposa, and therefore in many small towns of Canada, Jeff Thorpe (or someone just like him) runs the barber shop, and all civilians know the location of the one spot where they might have their hair cut. If a traveler were to ask a resident of Mariposa where he could retire for the evening, the traveler would undoubtedly be directed to Mr. Smith. For meat, the traveler would be directed to Netley�s butcher shop (known by the narrator to have been established in the year 1882). If the traveler wished to speak with the manager of the bank at 10:25 in the morning, any given person in Mariposa would be able to inform the traveler that Mullins does not start work until 10:30, in the event that he is not late due to his commute from the Mariposa house. The opening chapter is composed in unison with the rest of the novel � as a snapshot, or sketch, of a little town, written to familiarize the reader with a small town life that is typical of Canada. Each chapter is another snapshot, illustrating the day to day events in a town where everyone knows each other�s name.

It is not the intention of this paper to go into details about every anecdote which the novel offers, as a heavy discussion of plot would not complement, in any comprehensive manner, an analysis on narrative. It would however, be beneficial to begin with a general discussion on plot in order to establish the content which the narrator is describing. The narrator chooses Mr. Smith to be the first individual the reader becomes more intimately aware of. The two hundred and eighty pound hotel owner turns around a failing business by deciding not to ascribe his newly purchased hotel a flashy name. The revocation of his hotel�s liquor license occurs when the Mariposa judge and prosecuting attorney are left out in the cold, unable to drink. It is comically fitting that the couple would take revenge on Mr. Smith by using their power in the court, a legal action that could have been prevented had the two been able to drink. As a result, Smith waits for his legal advisor, while customers sit in the back bar of the hotel. The narrator comically describes the appearance of two of the guests:

�Mullens is a rather short, rather round, smooth-shaven man of less than forty, wearing one of those round banking suits of pepper and salt, and with the kind of gold tie-pin and heavy watch-chain and seals necessary to inspire confidence in matters of foreign exchange. Duff is just as round and just as short, and equally smoothly shaven, while his seals and straw hat are calculated to prove that the Commercial is just as sound a bank as the exchange� (Leacock, 8).

The narrator paints the caricatures with knowledge of personality and history of those in the bar, including the teacher who drank, and the sullenly dressed undertaker of Mariposa. The narrator informs the reader of the illiteracy of Mr. Smith as he is unable to read a letter, a fact which only ten people in the town are given credit for knowing (one of them being, obviously, the narrator).

The narrative takes a new form in the second section, as the story sounds like the narrator is speaking to a friend over a cup of coffee, retrospectively and nostalgically, about a town that is still around. �Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers and renovators, regardless of expense� (Leacock, 22). This passage is quoted merely for the phrase �as I think I said,� as its implication is significant. The narrator�s uncertainness of his prior statements argues in favor of the retrospective argument. The narrator is talking to someone regardless, be it an outside phantom-listener who is never mentioned, or simply the reader of the text. As if providing the reader or listener on a tour of the town, the narrator exits the hotel and looks across the street. The first sight one would see is Jefferson Thorpe�s barber shop. The narrator puts the reader into the shoes of any given individual walking into Thorpe�s shop, �As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring up and above and a bell that almost rings.� The pronoun you gives personalization to the story at hand, and one feels as if he is literally walking through the doors of a barber shop. To stray from this scene for a moment, Clara Thomas comments on this issue in her essay The Roads Back:

And always we are comfortably outside the senses we are watching, not required or invited to feel more than a momentary sentimental sympathy for Dean Drone for the loss of his self-esteem, or Judge Pepperleigh for the loss of his son (Thomas, 98-99).

Thomas�s argument is that Leacock leads his readers to ringside seats from which the reader can watch and listen into a series of episodes, short films, and accurate cartoons, whose characters overlap and whose attributes and adventures are completely recognizable as likely, though comically inflated (Thomas, 98). This argument is completely true, as Leacock, who Thomas indirectly attributes to being the narrator (an arguable comment), describes his carefully portrayed characters. Due to the fact that Leacock is the author of the novel, one could assume that this narrator is Leacock himself, but some devices that he uses (which will be discussed later) suggest otherwise. In the 1970 publication of Leacock�s work, Malcolm Ross accounts that Mariposa is recognizable as Orillia, Ontario, a town where Leacock spent many of his summers. However, to look further into this point would be to take a biographical approach to this novel, which is not the intention of the essayist. Returning to the barber shop, the narrator describes the art of receiving a shave from Thorpe, and how a simple shave could take upwards of forty-five minutes because of pauses in labor due to conversation. The narrator discusses how he would have long conversations with Thorpe, once again indicating that the narrator�s knowledge of the townsfolk is intimate, and not based on gossip, which gives credit to his reliability. The narrator�s comment of �To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full� (Leacock, 25) gives the reader two pieces of information. One is that the fictitious narrator has apparently visited the equally fictitious barber shop and conversed with the barber, as was previously discussed. The second piece of information in that the narrator himself claims that his intellect is humble, thereby reducing the overall reliability of the narration. After such a statement as this, why should the reader give this narrator any credit for being reliable? Exactly what does the narrator mean by humble intellect? Assumptions that the narrator is unintelligent become ambiguous after reading such passages as the following one, which comments on why it is better not to translate classical foreign literature into English: If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately. I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, and like to read Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying to put it into so poor a medium as English (Leacock, 56).

Why would a person with a �humble intellect� be aware of the opinions of classical scholars? Furthermore, why would he label the language which he is ironically speaking in as a poor medium, without having some deeper understanding of language? The narrator, therefore, is no simpleton, but just because he is somewhat intelligent does not make him reliable.

As the narrator continues to reminisce, the discussion of Thorpe�s secondary interest aside from cutting hair (the mine) led to a discussion about Myra, the wannabe actress who recited Edgar Allan Poe at a Methodist social. Once again, it is not so much the day to day lives of these characters that are interesting for the sake of the study of narration; it is the way in which the characters are linked. The town is so small that the discussion of one person leads the narrator into a rant about another. Throughout the novel, the narrator is constantly referring back to characters that have already been intimately established, and the reader slowly becomes a member of the town, who is sitting just outside, looking in. By the end of the book, dozens of characters have been introduced, and the reader is as well informed of Mariposa�s gossip as a bored, chatty manicurist sitting by an open window on Main Street with a pair of binoculars.

The narrator is in love with the natural beauty of Mariposa. As people board the majestic boat known as the Mariposa Bell, the narrator praises the superiority of Lake Wissanotti over the Italian lakes, the Tyrol, and the Swiss Alps, in regards to sublimity. Hence, by the section The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias, the reader is already well aware of many narrative opinions. The narrator�s love of Canada becomes a known fact as he states how wondrous a sound the national anthem is when sung by passengers of the Mariposa bell as it echoes across the water.

Further evidence supporting the �anecdote� theory proposed earlier in this paper appears in the Knights of Pythias section when the following line begins a new paragraph:

�What? Hadn�t I explained about the depth of Lake Wissanotti? I had taken it for granted you knew; and in any case parts of it are deep enough, though I don�t suppose in this stretch of it from the big reed beds up to within a mile of the town wharf, you could find six feet of water in it if you tried� (Leacock, 49)

The exclamation �what� in its place at the beginning of the sentence indicates that someone (i.e. the person listening to the narrator) had just made a comment along the lines of �You never explained about the depth of the lake,� prompting the narrator to reply with the word �what� in disbelief. Then, he once again addresses either the reader of the novel, or the phantom-listener to whom he is talking to, and refers to something which he has already said, with the words �you knew.� The following paragraph in the first Pupkin section follows a similar style:

So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudiments of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin. What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high-school teacher? In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea (Leacock, 93).

The narrator is either having a conversation with someone, has an imaginary friend and requires severe psychiatric assistance, or is being used as a brilliant device created by Leacock in order to fashion both debate (�what a ridiculous idea�) and comedy. The third option seems the most probable. There are many, many more examples which could be quoted in order to provide more evidence for this argument, but to do so would be superfluous, for obvious reasons.

Tense plays a large roll in the study of narration. In the section The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone, the narrator makes the following comment: �Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church� (Leacock, 61). The comment reveals that when this text was written (or spoken), the narrator was still living in the town, or at least involved with it. �Everybody remembers� as opposed to �Everybody remembered� suggests that all these people are still around, and that one could go ask any single resident of Mariposa about the construction of the church and would receive a positive response. Hence, this new evidence supports the argument of a �speaking to a friend over a cup of coffee� theory which was mentioned earlier. However, this theory is later negated at the end of the first Pupkin section: �Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the chapter and think about it� (Leacock, 96). The narrator directly acknowledges �the novel� form as the medium used to communicate his story. Therefore, the proposed idea of an outside phantom-listener is shown to be false.

The preceding examination of the narration in Leacock�s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town established many things. The narrator is omniscient, but has also been in physical contact with both the people he describes, and Mariposa itself. It would not be ridiculously farfetched to assume that the narrator of these sketches is Leacock himself, due to his familiarity with small town Canada. However it is more probable that the narrator is a device constructed by Leacock, in order to evoke comedy and a realistic narrative which makes the reader feel like he is actually standing on the dusty streets of Mariposa.

Word Count, Excluding Quotations - 2, 200.