Marco Antonio Rivera Martínez

Professor: Adriana Bellamy

English III/Reading

Time and Narrative: The “I”, the Subject and the Reader in Joseph Addison’s “The Tombs

in Westminster Abbey”

In Joseph Addison’s “The Tombs in Westminster Abbey” the essay organizing principles,

along with the modes of exposition, serve to exemplify the elements that constitute the genre

in terms of theme and style. Considering the relationship among the three elements that

constitute the essay: the “I”, the subject and the reader. “The tombs in Westminster Abbey”

illustrates how these elements are necessary to establish the conditions of the essay. In

Addison’s text the “I” and the subject are combined in a way that the reader is able to follow

and interpret his own way but still keep being guided by the narrator.

The first thing we are to notice in Addison’s “The Tombs in Westminster Abbey” is

that the theme is being addressed by the narrator’s “I” who presents himself as someone who

meditates from the center of the topic. This narrator introduces the theme to the reader from

his own perspective, but giving the reader the opportunity of interpreting while being guided

through the tombs. This narrator shows how his own outlook becomes the starting point of

the essay as we can see in the following example:

WHEN I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in

Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to

which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building; and the condition of

the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy,
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or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a

whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing

myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with those several

regions of the dead. (Addison 27)

What the narrators exposes while speaking about the uses of the place he is visiting is not but

his mere perspective on which the reader can either agree or disagree. This possibility of

agreeing or not with the narrator helps to establish the dialogue needed between writer and

reader in which the private fuses with the public in order to create an amalgam among

personal, intellectual and conceptual issues.

In “The tombs in Westminster Abbey”, Addison shows how he emphaticizes the

experiences of the narrator as the reader is able to meet with the narrator’s own thoughts

coming from deep inside his mind. But the fact that the reader would be able to know the

writer’s inner thoughts also means that, as long as the writer is choosing a side and taking

posture, the reader is also able to do so. Even though in Addison’s essay there is no direct

dialogue with the reader, the interaction becomes possible when noticing that the narrator

always points out that what is being spoken is his own perspective, feelings and emotions,

leaving the reader the opportunity of communicating with him. We can see this in the

following quote:

I do not know what is to be melancholy, and can therefore take a view of

nature in her deep and solemn scenes, with the same pleasure as in her most

gay and delightful ones. By this means, I can improve myself with those

objects others consider with terror. When I look upon the tombs of the

great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the

beautiful, ever inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of
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parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the

tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving those

whom we must quickly follow[…] (30)

In the case of “The tombs in Westminster Abbey” the topic seems to be specifically chosen

in order to create this interaction with the reader. Death has always been a theme of concern

to every single person as we all living beings are to die somehow and somewhen. In

Addison’s essay we are meeting with the narrator’s vision of death, but death is something

universal that affects every living creature, the narrator’s perspective is just one more, one

that he shares with every single reader who takes his essay and navigates through the ocean

of tombs represented in words.

To sum up, the characteristics of the essay are present in “The Tombs in Westminster

Abbey” by Joseph Addison. In this text the capacity of the writer of taking a topic of interest

and exposing it through his own perspective in order to create a dialogue with the reader is

shown in a way can be identified. Addison exceptionally fuses private and public, general

and particular, situations and experience, and the commenting attitude towards the world

while freely organizing his semantic contents with flexibility. The topic chosen to write about

has helped to create this essay in which the conditions that make the reader, the subject and

the “I” who presents his arguments combine to create a tripartite relationship. In the end the

whole text resumes to “we all are to die someday, what we think about it, or reject to think

about it is our own choice.”