The Strategic Third-Person: Narrative Distance and Agency in Rushdie's Joseph Anton

Abstract

This article explores the purpose and significance of the third-person narrative approach in Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012). It argues that the third-person strategy allows the author to maintain objectivity and create narrative distance while retaining authorial agency. A memoir is conventionally narrated in the first person, but Rushdie creates Joseph Anton as the narrator and articulates a decade of his life in hiding after the fatwa was declared against him. By drawing on theoretical insights into the autobiographical pact and third-person autobiography proposed by Philippe Lejeune, and on the concept of narrative identity developed by Paul Ricoeur, this article scrutinizes how Rushdie has constructed the ‘autobiographical subject’ and created narrative authority in the memoir. The article concludes that the third-person narrative point of view in the memoir is not just a stylistic choice but an indispensable rhetorical strategy for creating a vantage point through which he observes and critiques crucial moments of his life and asserts authorial agency in the narrative. Furthermore, this narrative distance allows him to take ownership of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ and redefine the notion of truth in life writing.