Reviewed by: We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction by Natalya Bekhta Marshall Lewis Johnson Natalya Bekhta. We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2020. 203p. In We-Narratives, Natalya Bekhta develops the category of “wenarrators” as “genuinely plural voices that have no individual speaker behind them and that emanate from groups, communities, collectives, [End Page 99] or nations” (1). A we-narrative importantly does not involve “individual characters acting in the we-mode” but “groups themselves, which thus function as characters and as narrators” (17). As a well-known example, Bekhta analyzes William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” as a “setup” that “invites the reader to adopt the villagers’ opinions . . . as well as their shock” when they find Homer Barron’s corpse (4). Bekhta delineates how a we-narrator is not the same as a narrator who utilizes the “we” pronoun to hide his/her own intentions, as with the narrator in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Parricide,” where the function of the “we” makes the singular narrator’s “opinions and feelings ‘objective’ where they are intimate and subjective” (28). After three chapters that demonstrate how we-narration is unique in relation to rhetorical narratology, Bekhta then examines we-narrators as voyeurs, gossips, and communities, all fascinatingly involving questions of collective knowledge and what the author calls an “us versus them” dynamic. The work is at its strongest in the last three chapters. In discussing Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Bekhta describes the we-narrator’s voyeurism as a “group of neighborhood boys” captivated by the Lisbon girls (115). This assesses narratology questions of focalization and perspective because “[m]etaphorical personhood is one of a group’s ‘collective artifacts’ . . . such as group beliefs or social institutions” (112). Regarding collective knowledge, we-narrative “offers insight into the performative act of knowledge creation . . . exemplifying the social nature of knowledge” (134). This is an observation, I might add, with profound impacts for epistemology in a post-truth era, as truths are often debated socially. Finally, in an analysis of “Watch the Animals” by Alice Eliott Dark, Bekhta examines the “us versus them” dynamic to reveal that “[c]ommunities exist by containing differences” that are otherwise disruptive of community identity (168). Thus, the character of Diana is treated as an “outsider” due to her animal rights activism until the end of the story, when “we” insist on caring for Diana’s animals during her terminal illness and after her death (169, 174-75). This insistence only comes about after “we” refuse to take the money Diana offers, but instead start arriving at her house uninvited to care for her and the animals, ultimately driving her to suicide in a way that “we” conveniently overlook. Much of this final chapter fascinates in an age of “alt-right” politics as an assessment of the behaviors of a “conservative community toward outsiders” (172). [End Page 100] On the whole, the last three chapters fascinate while the first three could have been condensed. Much of the discussion of rhetorical narratology takes on the shape of literature review or unnecessary distraction instead of assessment of the already unique and fascinating we-narratives Bekhta scrutinizes. In arguing in favor of the “usefulness of the author category” to eliminate the question of an “impossible enunciator,” Bekhta claims that this “removes the largely irrelevant questions of how a group can physically speak as one” (75). It seems, however, that much of what enchants about we-narration is precisely these “irrelevant” questions. Of course, it is not realistically possible that a we-narrator in “Watch the Animals” is dictating this story as a collective, and that is the point. We-narrative is a fictional representation of communal forms of knowledge and conservatism, and this fictional exploration is not meant to be considered as anything but. In this sense, while fiction expands what one can imagine regarding how to understand and analyze the human condition, this does not mean that we must imagine works of fiction as applying to the laws of interpersonal communication. After all, what could be more fascinating than imagining “how a group can physically speak as one”? Marshall Lewis Johnson University of Nevada, Reno Copyright...