“Nothing but evasion” Narrative opacity in Charles Dickens’s The Italian Prisoner

Although Charles Dickens is renowned for detailed narration, his fiction also relies on strategically significant omissions. The article examines these absences through Lamarque’s concept of “narrative opacity” (2014), according to which textual meaning stems from the relationship between narrative content and its mode of presentation. Also drawing on Gerald Prince’s notions of “unnarration” (i.e. events that cannot be narrated) and “disnarration” (i.e. events that only occur hypothetically or negatively), the essay analyses Dickens’s short story “The Italian Prisoner” (1860) and explores the author’s uneasiness in representing Italian criminality. Through close textual analysis, the paper argues that the story’s tripartite structure foregrounds opacity surrounding time, space, and criminal agency. The protagonist, Giovanni Carlavero, is imprisoned and released without clear explanation, and narrator and reader alike are excluded from complete knowledge of events. These omissions generate narrative tension, while simultaneously inviting the reader to actively reconstruct meaning. The only plausible interpretation, however, casts the Italian legal system in a negative light, depicting it as opaque and corrupt. Through these strategies, Dickens articulates a broader critique of continental justice and aligns with nineteenth-century representations of Southern Europe as a morally and institutionally deficient Other. “The Italian Prisoner” thus reflects Victorian anxieties about foreign criminality and resonates with Dickens’s portrayal of foreign offenders in Little Dorrit (1857) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859).