First Person Point of View in George Eliot's Middlemarch Anonymous College

According to The Journal of Literary Technique, the narrative voice in Middlemarch uses “an authoritative system of interpretation adequate to explain the particular experience of each individual character”(Clark-Beattie 199). In chapter 37, Eliot employs this technique in order to describe Mr. Casaubon’s complex feelings toward Will Ladislaw, his distant relative and previous beneficiary. By employing the first person narrator, the reader is exposed to Mr. Casaubon’s innermost thoughts and motives, and gains a more holistic understanding of this character that they would not otherwise have.

One passage where the authoritative narrator is most prominent is when Mr. Casaubon is reflecting on a conversation he had with Mr. Brooke about Will. Here, the narrator tells readers that Mr. Casaubon “had disliked Will while he helped him, but he had begun to dislike him still more now that Will had declined his help. That is the way with us when we have an uneasy jealousy in our disposition; if our talents chiefly are of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and anyone who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the...