The Implied Reader

The implied reader is a tactic used by the author to make themselves trusted by the actual reader. In the case of Morpurgo’s narrative, this structure involves utterances such as the implied author instructing the implied reader to ‘[l]ie back now and rest’ and ‘I’ll tell you all about them, I’ll tell you all about me’ (15). This line at the closing of the first chapter gives the story which ensues the sense of a bedtime story, told by a trusted parental figure. By ensconcing an author and reader in the text within this relationship, the reader is more likely to follow the author to their desired meaning. As Chambers (1985: 98) argues:

[a]t the level of creating the implied reader and of an author’s need to draw a child reader into his book, this narrowing of focus by the adoption of a child point of view helps keep the author’s second self – himself in the book – within the perceptual scope of the child reader. And the child, finding within the book an implied author whom he can befriend because he is of the tribe of childhood as well, is thus wooed into the book. He adopts the image of the implied child reader and is then willing, may even desire, to give himself up to the author and the book and be lead through whatever experience is offered.

This depiction of the implied reader’s relationship with the implied author is somewhat simplistic, and while Morpurgo offers up the image of the unnamed boy, who is arguably the child in the book, as part of the frame narrative, it is difficult to place the author in the book within the ‘tribe of childhood’. The implied reader will relate quite closely to the focalizer of a given text; in the case of Arthur, High King

of Britain with its unnamed boy protagonist, Morpurgo is stating who he wants his

reader to be as ‘[w]hen reading a text a reader is made aware of the kind of reader that is ‘desired’ by the text’ (Cocks, 2004: 94). Morpurgo’s protagonist is male (1), on the cusp of adolescence (2) white (every picture depicts him as such, see Appendix D) and British (2). Consequently it is reasonable to assume that the text’s implied reader is also a white British male. Such a focalising strategy excludes all those who are not of this kind, or insists that they subsume themselves within the image of the protagonist in order to have a fully realised reading experience. This is a generalisation of the way in which a child reader approaches a text, and as previously stated, many child readers enjoy reading subversively. The view of the subsumed reader is supported by other critics, such as Zipes, of whom May (1995: 66) argues:

[t]he author’s rhetorical style controls the reader’s response, and that the author shapes his writing to for his adult attitudes about what is “best” for the child’s life within the culture surrounding him […] if children’s literature is carefully analysed as language used to form cultural values, it will not reveal “truths reprinted” but will instead show adult interpretations of reality. Rhetoric can create an illusion of truth by the perspective used within the author’s retelling of known facts.

If these opinions are viewed with the consideration that the actual child reader does not necessarily respond in the way of the generic and inexperienced reader imagined by such critics then it is necessary to understand the importance of the age of the implied reader, as, recalling Grenby’s (2008) introduction to his text, it is not possible to talk of ‘the child reader’ as a single entity, as this would comprise readers from infancy to adulthood. The age of the implied reader will give an indication, but not a concrete foundation, of the way in which the child reader may approach a text. Pre-adolescent readers are more likely to be readerly readers, and consequently not interrogate the textual material they encounter.

The author of a text choses the focalizer, and thus the implied reader, making them fundamentally important to the message of the story. It is the implied reader to whom the author is speaking, and therefore the implied reader acts as a powerful device for ensuring that the desired meaning, the moral message or didactic purpose, is found by the reader. However, Chambers (1985: 98) also stipulates that the author within the text will be of the ‘tribe’ of childhood, and thus will appear in the text as a child or child-like figure. This is not the case with Morpurgo’s text. While the focalizer is the child in the text, they are clearly not the author in the text, with this role instead falling to the God-like Arthur, appearing as an omniscient immortal who provides the narration and the weight of history. This works in conjunction with the metanarrative of religious authority, with repeated invocations to the reader to have faith, as Arthur states ‘believe I took you from the sea. Believe I carried you in here. Believe those are your clothes drying by the fire. Believe you are lying in my bed’ (14). These invocations reinforce the inherent power imbalance in children’s literature and lend an overt tone of didacticism to Morpurgo’s Arthurian work.