Trust Issues...Still!

            We have talked a lot about the way the epistolary form forces the reader to question the narrators and whether or not the things they say, or write, are trustworthy. However, I would argue that Sense and Sensibility, though it employs an omniscient narrator, also leaves a fair amount of room for questioning on the reader’s part. For example, after Elinor defends Edward’s “‘taste for drawing,’” the narrator relates that Marianne, “though smiling within herself at the mistake…honored her sister for that blind partiality to Edward which produced it” (57). Not only must we question Marianne’s interpretation of the events in the novel – what authority does she have to call Elinor’s impression a “mistake?” – we also cannot fully trust Elinor’s opinions as her alleged “blind partiality” highlights the subjectivity of her judgments. Later in the first volume, the narrator reveals that Mrs. Jennings suspects Colonel Brandon’s affection for Marianne “on the first evening of their being together, from his listening so attentively while she sang to them” (73). However, on the page before that, we are told that “Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard her without being in raptures” (72). Again, we are unable to trust individual characters’ interpretations of particular events due to the biases they bring to the table, even when their voices are filtered through an omniscient narrator. I find this dynamic funny in a lot of places, as the narrator often becomes quite snarky when communicating different characters’ (often eccentric) thoughts and impressions.