To what extent is Aphra Behn's 'Oronooko' a novel? Consider notions such as realism, characterisation and narrative method.

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko proves a difficult text to place within the genre of the British novel, largely due to the way in which the text’s narrator itself overtly refutes that it is a work of fiction and thus shuns the familiar fictional devices which we commonly associate with the traditional novel. However, its generic features of captivity and romance alongside Behn’s fictitious characterisation perhaps prompt us to reconsider what qualifies our definition of the British novel.Although - Behn’s opening chapter does affirm her denial of this work as fiction, ‘I was myself an eye witness to a great part of what you will find here set down’ insisting the reader of her reliability as a narrator and detaching herself from the world of fiction. Thus, the works of imagination and invention to pleasure the reader are disparaged, instead favouring the value of truth – ‘I do not pretend in giving you the history of a royal slave, to entertain my reader with adventures of a feigned hero’.  This detachment from fiction is even conveyed through the style of narration itself, not a faceless omniscient story teller which commonly feature in traditional novels, but rather one whom we would not expect - a dominant first-person narrator who clearly explains
how she came about this story – ‘what I could not be witness of, I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history’. Conversely, the characterisation of Oroonoko as this symbol of heroism and nobility, both physically ‘his face not of that brown rusty black… but perfect ebony’ and psychologically ‘had as great a soul…sensible of power’ deconstructs the realism to which Behn initially claims, rather generating a typically fictional character of awe. She even describes Oronooko as the ‘the beautiful black Venus’ likening her to the ancient Roman goddess of love and beauty. Thus, the idealised romance between this impotent King and a damsel in distress’ adds to this fictitious reality, where upon their very first meeting Oroonoko and Imoinda both experience instant adoration, ‘that silent language of new-born love’ – quite literally love at first sight. This idealistic heroism conveyed through the characterisation of Oroonoko continues through to the novel’s final scene, where Oroonoko meets his gruesome fate with impossible courage ‘they cut off his ears and his nose… he still smoked on… hacked off one of his arms, and he still bore up, and held his pipe’. This gives evidence of Behn’s characterisation of Oroonoko as superhuman, attempting to engage and excite the reader and therefore attributing fictional features to this text.