Penelope Lively employs unconventional narrative techniques in her seventh novel Moon Tiger to illustrate how so-called historical events shift in meaning and interpretation depending on the storyteller. Although several critics have noted these techniques, no one to date has considered them in detail. Yet a close examination suggests that Lively's narration is internally inconsistent and that she is not as successful playing around with narrative authority as it may first appear.

Lively scholars seem to take for granted who is telling the story: multiple narrators, including different characters revealing their own perspectives on a given event. In Penelope Lively, the most extensive examination of Lively's works thus far, Mary Hurley Moran addresses how kaleidoscopic narration is used in Moon Tiger to "undermine the convention of positing narrative authority and thereby drawing our attention to the fact that there is no final truth about anyone or anything" (Moran 120). More specifically, Moran assumes that the different perspectives seemingly presented by the various characters are, in fact, their true voices:

We find ourselves assuming that Claudia's point of view is authoritative. But then we are jolted out of this assumption when the narrative shifts again, from first-person memory to kaleidoscopic flashback, and we witness the way other characters experienced the episode Claudia has just recalled: the discrepancies between their interpretations and Claudia's undermine her authority. This is particularly true of flashbacks involving characters who are very different from Claudia, such as Lisa and Sylvia. The cutaways to their consciousness reveal that these women are far more sensitive and aware than Claudia, who is dismissive and contemptuous of conventional people, realizes. (120)

Raschke is not as explicit as Moran in assuming multiple narrators, but we can infer that she assumes it. "No one point of view dominates Moon Tiger. There are many voices and many layers" (Raschke 124). She is more interested than Moran in examining what these different voices tell us about Claudia as a female character:

...the reader in this text is split between a multitude of perspectives and voices and between a multitude of Claudias. There is Claudia the adventurer, Claudia the lover, and Claudia the scaler of rocks, wars, and prodigious historical figures. There is Claudia the refuser of the mother-woman, who sees "children as beings apart" and who does not hear her child's plea. There is Lisa's view of Claudia: the Claudia who "has never seen Lisa detached from Claudia," the flawed storyteller who sometimes gets "simple basic things" wrong; there is the Claudia who is always the heroine of Tom Southern's stories; there is the Claudia lying in the nursing home, still mentally keen, but needing the nurse to prop her up. (125)

Yet there is another plausible interpretation of Moon Tiger which Lively's critics don't examine: that all the various perspectives are, in fact, imagined and told by Claudia alone. Let us consider, then, the text from two viewpoints (multiple characters' and exclusively Claudia's), determine which seems more coherent, and from there interpret what Lively may have intended.

Let's begin where the text most strongly suggests that Claudia is the only true narrator. Claudia sets the stage in the first chapter by saying that she is writing a history of the world, and we discover as the novel unfolds that the novel itself can be viewed as that history. Under this scenario, all the voices are told through Claudia, the author of the history. As she states:

The voice of history is composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard. Some louder than others, naturally. My story is tangled with the stories of others - Mother, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, and one other person above all; their voices must be heard also, thus shall I abide by the conventions of history…So, since my story is also theirs, they too must speak--Mother, Gordon, Jasper… Except that of course I have the last word. The historian's privilege. (5-6)

This passage, placed significantly at the very beginning of the book, certainly suggests that their voices are being told by Claudia, the historian who determines what the history must include. In fact, it is hard to know how else to interpret this. Who would be writing this story, if not Claudia? If all the characters are speaking, how does Claudia's notion that this is a history, her history, allow for others to actually speak? It is far more credible to assume that, like any good researcher, she has used the available information she has from her own experience to reconstruct her best approximation of what these other characters might have felt or thought. It is only by looking at those passages more closely that we will be able to decide if she could have written them. But let us first consider a different question.

Is Claudia a character capable of imagining the viewpoints of others? She presents herself, after all, as egocentric and opinionated. One might assume from this that Claudia simply isn't able to imagine, or even be interested in, how others think.

Yet there is plenty to suggest otherwise. For one, Claudia is a journalist and an historian, two occupations that require flexibility in one's thinking (at least for the sort that she practices). Claudia must be able to consider context, motive, and nuance in order to write good articles and stories. We know that she savors a good argument and, judging from the ongoing engagement of her sparring partners Jasper and Gordon over the years, is probably good at it. Yet the skill of arguing well requires clear thinking, intelligence, and the ability to consider matters from multiple perspectives. All of these characteristics suggest that Claudia is capable of imagining, even if sometimes imperfectly, how others think. Certainly the details she provides for her own versions of history are vivid, credible, and three-dimensional:

In my history of the world the fall of Tezcuco will be differently seen. Or perhaps not seen but heard…They shall hear the tramping of Cortez's long march to the interior, the rain, the wind, the swearing and the grumbling, they shall hear the awful hiss of Popocatepetl into whose smoking maw the Spaniards descend…They shall hear Montezuma's welcome to Cortez, and Cortez's affirmation of friendship and respect. They shall hear the clink and clatter of the gold and silver gifts heaped upon the Spaniards - the collars and necklaces and bracelets and other ornaments, the drinking vessels and platters. They shall hear the interested comments of the Spaniards upon the workmanship, the weight, the probable value. (158)

Knowing Claudia is imaginative is not enough, but fortunately we have more to work with than that. In a flashback to Egypt during the war, the voice is Claudia's (68). She has entered a club and observed the scene. The narration switches to interior dialogue for a while: "This is medieval, she thinks - why did I never think of that before?… And over there if I am not mistaken is this chap who might wangle me a ride up to the front if I play it right" (69). Slipping back to exterior dialogue, "he rises, pulls out a chair, clicks his fingers at the suffragi. And looks appreciatively at the legs, the hair, the outfit which is not the get-up of the average woman press correspondent." After a section break, the text immediately continues: "At least it is assumed that that is what he was doing since he tried later to get me into bed." The first passage began with Claudia's voice and the second continued it, yet we have a brief glimpse into the mind of the admiring pilot. He not only does something observable (looking appreciatively) but also makes a judgement (she is not dressed like a press correspondent.) Claudia makes clear in the next sentence that this is merely her conjecture, based on his later behavior. She explicitly lets us know that she is the one who has attempted reconstructing his thoughts (and, she implies, has conjectured about them with the possibility of error). So we know that she is capable of and interested in making conjectures about what others think.

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