The narrator is not only the person who buys space on a printed page in exchange for a desired service, the arrest and return of his runaway by 'whoever apprehends any of the above slaves', as Richard Poore wrote. Likewise, the recipient, the 'ideal' reader, is not only the person likely to arrest the slave in the notice and bring him or her back to their master. Through the notice, the narrator is engaging in a twofold process. He is speaking about himself through the slave, in a type of self-representation described by Walter Johnson in his study of the New Orleans slave markets: 'slaveholders often represented themselves to one another by reference to their slaves' (Johnson, 1999, p. 13) but he is also making the slave speak indirectly, perhaps without realizing. The meeting of these two voices, and the circle or echo-chamber they create (Genette, Figures III, 1972, p. 10), ${ }^{3}$ turn the notice into a form of biographical narrative, a polyphony involving the fugitive protagonist, the narrator, and the slave-owning society in general. That narrative is addressed as much to the slaves as it is to those who share the narrators' social power, and to the narrators themselves, confronted by the refusal, through flight, of a man or woman to submit to their supposedly legitimate power.  
What exactly do we mean by narrative? In choosing that word, do we not take the risk of over-interpreting the notices, making them into something other than what they were from around the start of the eighteenth century, a few square centimetres of text subject to the rules of monetary trade?  
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[^0]:    3 The 'cercle de leur renvoi réciproqué: Genette is speaking of the complex relationship between the work and its author.