SOURCE: Thomas, David P. “Goodbye to Berlin: Refocusing Isherwood's Camera.” Contemporary Literature 13, no. 1 (winter 1972): 44-52.

In the following essay, Thomas discusses the narrators in Isherwood's work.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. 

The second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin (1930)¹ has become almost the obligatory starting point for discussions of Christopher Isherwood's fiction. Richard Mayne asserts that it “very closely describes the role which Isherwood plays as the narrator of his novels. Here, he is a self-effacing onlooker, making no judgments, forming no attachments, withholding imaginative sympathy, ultimately not involved,”² while G. H. Bantock, quoting the same passage, complains of “the lack of a sense of personal reaction, except insofar as the mere...