Narrative Intricacy in Robert Southey’s Storyworld: Locutor Voice and Monitority in “The Battle of Blenheim”

Abstract

This study explores the narrative intricacy of Robert Southey’s “The Battle of Blenheim” by examining the use of monitority and locutor voice. Using these techniques, the paper analyses how the poet represents the ‘restricted perspective of the locutor’ rather than a distanced straightforward historical narrative of the experience of battle, providing an intrinsic and particularised perspective on war and prompting reflection on it. Southey’s strategy of monitority thus carries an evaluative dimension, revealing the experienced and characterised aspects of war and deviating from external generalisations of war. However, the locutor voice, which captures the focalised perspective, tone, and discourse, articulates the characters’ emotional states. The interplay of monitority and locutor voice creates an intricate narrative of the war, highlighting its brutality, the anguish and the emotional burden it inflicts. The portrayal of war’s catastrophic nature counters the traditional glorification of war as a victory, while the protracted emotional engagement indicates psychological effects on individuals. As such, Southey’s poem turns out to be an acute narrative of war, driven by a crafty interaction of monitoring and locutor voice, examines the war with polyvocal shades of fancy, joy, suffering and eventual loss, which engages the readers with critical distance as well as empathy and sympathy with those affected by its utter consequences.