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<title> Who remembers in Remembering Babylon? </title>
The title given to this essay refers to the special narrative technique used in Remembering Babylon written by the Australian writer David Malouf in 1993. If misunderstood, the title might also seem to give a hint that the novel itself, as a narration, will be discussed, but this is not the case. I will try to just focus on the narrative technique and the use of the narrator in the analysed novel. My opinions are based on two specific passages in the novel. The first passage is the opening paragraphs of the novel down to the line "'Do not shoot', it shouted. 'I am a B-b-british object!'" The second passage is at the end of chapter two and starts of with the line "When darkness fell he crept close to the hut" and ends with the chapter ending. 

In the first passage in Remembering Babylon I think it is made evident that the narrator is not telling the story in a retrospective way, since there is no character employing a first-person perspective. If you know something about the book before you start reading it, for example if you have read the backside of the book, you would perhaps assume that the main character, Gemmy, is the narrator. However, I believe that the narrator knows too much about the other characters' feelings, especially the boy Lachlan Beattie's, to be the main character. This becomes clear in the first passage sentence "He heard a faint far-off rushing, like wind rolling down a tunnel, and it took him a moment to understand that it was coming from inside him". 

In the second passage we get to know a lot about Gemmy's feelings and thoughts, for instance in the sentence "He waited for a bullet to bring him down, or for the creature, or spirit, to decide it was time to rise upwards and lift him away". Since we know a great deal about the inner view of at least two characters by now, instead of one, it is difficult to know which character to rely on. What I am trying to say is that when their views of the story differ a bit you really do not know what is supposed to be truth. On the other hand this narrative technique adds details and information about the events in the novel. In the first passage we learn how the kids look upon the intruder and in the second passage we learn how Gemmy looks upon the kids. This way we get to know things about the characters that they would not tell us themselves. For instance, on page three, we are told that there is a bit of blue rag around the middle from which sleeves hang down and that is referring to Gemmy. Gemmy himself would probably not give us that information. 

Due to the fact that we have access to at least two characters' inner feelings combined with the fact that all characters are presented in a third-person perspective gives a signal that the narrator is external and omniscient. This theory is also confirmed by the fact that the narrator's knowledge of time ranges and setting is unlimited. As a matter of fact, the narrator's knowledge about it, is shown already in the first sentence of the novel which begins with "One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast...". 

However, despite my suggestion about narratorial omniscience, it seems to me that there are at least two different possibilities when it comes to the narration angle. At first I thought, of course the narrator does both the seeing and the talking since the narrator is omniscient. But there is also another possibility that there is one narrator who is seeing all events, settings and characters and yet another narrator, external to the narration, that is telling us the story. There is a sentence on page two that strongly indicates that the narrator is in the narration itself and sees everything: "In the intense heat that made everything you looked at warp and glare...". In this specific sentence the narrator could have used "they" instead of "you", but his or her choice of word reveals that the narrator was present at the farm. The other narrator is the one that has access to all minds. An example is the second passage sentences "He did not want to be taken back. What he wanted was to be recognised." This shows how he feels and a narrator present at the farm could not know what Gemmy feels, if the narrator is not Gemmy himself and I have already rejected that possibility.

In conclusion I can say that the narrative technique used in Remembering Babylon is a difficult one to understand completely when analysing the novel. However, the very same technique gives us readers a more complete and detailed picture of events and characters than what we would have got if the story was told by one person in retrospective. Furthermore, the use of narratorial omniscience makes the characters more alive and the story more credible.
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