Epistolary Form & Narrative Voice
English Lit: OCR A Level Dracula, topic 6.1.1
Epistolary Form and Narrative Techniques
Dracula is written in the form of an epistolary novel. Each narrator has their own distinctive voice.
Epistolary novel
- Dracula is written in the form of an epistolary novel.
- The anonymous preface asserts that there is a deliberateness to their sequencing.
- The multiple first-person narratives create an element of immersive realism, enabling the reader to suspend their disbelief and “believe things which we know to be untrue" (Chapter 14)
Narrative voices
- Each narrator has their own distinctive voice - relaying the events subjectively as they saw them.
- In places, Stoker utilises elements of the Gothic convention of the unreliable narrator - particularly through Jonathan’s account of his time in Transylvania, which places him under a great deal of mental stress.
Narrative delusion?
- Critic Andrés Roméro Jódar from the University of Zaragoza takes this idea further, proposing the narrators are constantly suffering delusion and that the events that are said to have happened through the diaries of the characters of the novel may not have even happened at all.
Test yourself on Epistolary Form & Narrative Voice
Which of these are true of Dracula?