Damon Galgut's Booker Prize-Winning Novel The Promise and the "Return" of the Omniscient Narrator
Contemporary South African writer Damon Galgut's Booker Prize-winning nov-el The Promise fully taps into the nineteenth-century realist convention of omniscience and creates an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator as a histor to investigate the transformation of South Africa from Apartheid to the Rainbow Nation as well as to penetrate the inner worlds of characters and agents mainly via free indirect discourse.What is stylistically striking about Galgut's employment or appropriation of omniscience is that the epistemic and narrative au-thority rendered by conventional omniscience is posed as a central target for challenge and subversion.On one hand,it sets out to imitate the collective mind of the white South Africans in the typical vein of the Victorian novel,while on the other hand,it calls upon the reader to react to and deconstruct the racist unconscious laid bare by way of a purposeful silence or blank within the text.Therefore,the highly self-reflexive narrator in The Promise can be seen as the author's individualistic response to the call of contemporary South African literature at the crossroads of realism and(post)modernism.
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