Tuesday, August 6, 2013

The Phantom Narrator: Louis from "The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc"


 

The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is my least favorite of the works I’ve read of Mark Twain thus far (and I’ve read more than a few!). My reasons are as follows:


-          It lacked the characteristic humor (or at least dark satire) that makes a Mark Twain book a Mark Twain book.

-          Although it recorded a lot of events from Joan of Arc’s life, I felt Twain didn’t really add anything of his own to the story.  It was more like reading a biography or history book than a historical fiction novel.

-          The narrator, Louis, was a Phantom Narrator


In fact, most of the characters in this novel are phantoms. I never got attached or related to any of them. Even the title heroine Joan of Arc was a phantom: Louis goes on and on about how perfect she is, and yet her perfection cost her any depth of personality or psychological complexity. 



Louis is not completely passive, I’ll give him that. He and his friends follow Joan into battle of their own free will with a loyalty and friendship that stems from…well, apparently just because Joan is awesome. Sadly Louis’ motivations are never given more foundation than Joan being the charismatic leader of a noble cause. 


One gets the feeling throughout the novel that Twain was so entranced by the life of Joan of Arc and the person that she was, that he couldn’t bear to humanize the girl saint or commit the sacrilege of peppering his plot with bits of dark humor. As a result, the book is flat.


I would recommend this book to read, not for enjoyment of literature, but actually for a history class.  It would make a good essay or research paper, comparing Twain’s interpretation with the historical facts.

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