SOURCE: “The Uses and Ends of Discourse in I promessi sposi: Manzoni's Narrator, His Characters, and Their Author,” in MLN, Vol. 101, No. 1, January, 1986, pp. 51-77.

In the following essay, Lucente asserts that Manzoni's use of language in I promessi sposi is central to an understanding of the novel's theme and structure.

Questions of language, particularly of its worldly use and abuse, are of major concern in I promessi sposi.¹ These questions begin with the book's introduction and continue, though in constantly varying forms and contexts, throughout the novel. In the introduction the narrator states his reasons for reworking the story, which he claims to have found in an anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript, and begins to explain the procedures he has adopted for revising its language. Although toward the end of the introduction the narrator makes an oblique reference to himself as an “author,” the guise he assumes actually combines...