Narrating Communities: In The Castle of My Skin , Bleak House , and Dual Narration

Abstract: Typically compared to other modernist autobiographies, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin has a more unlikely resemblance to a book with which it ostensibly shares very little: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House . Lamming uses Dickens’s dual narrators—the first-person autobiographical voice and the third-person omniscient perspective—and weaves them together through the personal development of his protagonist, G, as he ages and watches his village change. Lamming uses the form of the autobiographical novel and Dickens’s narrators to create a panoramic view of an entire village. He then juxtaposes those two narrators with the dominant narratives of the empire, represented locally by the landlord and broadly by selectively edited versions of history that are taught to the Barbadians in school, and creates the narrative space for resistance to colonial narratives through the form of narration pioneered by Dickens a century prior.