Narrative_Perspective

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE / POINT OF VIEW All stories are told by someone. When we first listen to a story ,as a child we are very aware of the person telling it to us, and of the voice they use. (Very young children can be soothed to sleep by the sound of a parent's voice reading them a story . ) This voice does not disappear when a story is written down: as we read a story we "hear" a "voice" in our brain. Just as a spoken voice can affect us through its tone and style, and also tell us something about the speaker (eg: age, gender, area where they live, emotion), so the "voice" of a written story will .convey information about its "speaker". Fiction is, obviously, written by somebody - the author whose name appears on the cover. It is not, however, necessarily the author's voice which tells the story. The author creates a NARRATOR. Narrative is a more formal term for story; the narrator is the teller of the narrative. It is the narrator's voice which we "hear" when we read a piece of fiction. (Note that this is often referred to as narrative voice, meaning the voice of the story ) . It is important, therefore, when discussing and writing about fiction, to remember that it is not the author telling us things, but the narrator. The same story can be told by different people - a slightly different story will be the result, since the way a story is told helps to create the total effect or meaning of the story. Equally, the same story-teller can tell a story in a variety of different ways and, again, the result will be somewhat different stories. Both of these variable factors apply to the narration of fiction: the author has to consciously choose both the type of narrator (teller) for the story and the type of narrative (way of telling). When studying a piece of fiction, the narrative technique used is one of the most important things to consider and examine. PERSPECTIVE is a term used to describe the angle from which something is seen. A perspective drawing is one which represents the way in which the objects in the drawing relate to the person drawing them - it reveals the angle or point of view from which the object is seen. When we study narrative, it is necessary to establish the NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE - the point of view or angle taken towards the narrative by the narrator. Where does the voice telling the story stand in relation to it' Is it involved in it, or is it an outside observer, watching and relating what is taking place but not taking Dart' The majority of fiction is written in the THIRD PERSON. This means that the subjects of the narrative are referred to as she/he/they/it/Mrs Bloggs etc. We refer to this as third person narrative. When we read a narrative of this type, it as though the narrator is slightly "apart" from "them", from the subjects of the story. The majority of fiction is also narrated by a narrator who is OMNISCIENT. Omniscient means having infinite or extensive knowledge. We would expect an omniscient narrator to be "all-knowing" - to display extensiv knowledge about the narrative and its subjects. The omniscient narrator may, for example, have knowledge of, and reveal to the reader: detailed factual information; thoughts and emotions of characters; past and future events (narrator often move around in time). A third person omniscient narrative is, therefore, a narrative told from the point of view of someone who is -"outside' or "removed" from the action (third person), and who has extensive knowledge about the narrative (omniscient). In some third person narratives the author attempts to make the narrative voice as unnoticeable as possible: we are meant to read the story without being made particularly aware of who is telling it to us. These are often referred to as unintrusive or impersonal narratives. In these kind of fictions, the story will simply be "revealed" or "shown" to the reader without additional comments or judgements from the narrator. Many fiction writers, however, make use of the INTRUSIVE NARRATOR: here the narrator will comment on, as well as report, the story, and will often give judgements and evaluations. of characters, places and events. Since the omniscient narrator is "all-knowing", comments and judgements of this type will seem highly authoritative - since the narrator knows everything that is happening (and has, and will happen), and everything that characters are thinking and feeling, we place great trust in their accompanying comments and opinions. Thus, when we read a novel THIRD PERSON OMNISCIENT NARRATIVE The passage below is taken from Hilda Lessways, a novel by Arnold Bennett (1867 1931) Mr Skellorn did not come; he was most definitely late. From the window of her bedroom, at the front of the house, Hilda looked westwards up toward the slopes of Chatterley Wood, where as a child she used to go with other children to pick the sparse bluebells that thrived on smoke. The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost, lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's window, was a fiour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke 10 as the kilns and chimneys dosing the prospect on either hand. From the flour-mill a bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Less-ways Street, in front of Mrs Lessways' house. By this path Mr Skellorn should have arrived, for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages. Hilda held Mr Skellorn in disdain, as she held the row of cottages in disdain. It seemed to her that Mr Skellorn and thecottages mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness, their detestable self-complacency. Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered them with 20 her scorn. The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the feudal consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor. Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real achieve- 30 ment. Nevertheless Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit this. She saw in Freehold Villas nothing but narrowness (what long narrow strips of gardens, and what narrow homes all flattened together!), and uniformity, and brickiness, and polished brassiness, and righteousness, and an eternal laundry. Find examples where the narrator provides the following: 1) Factual detail about the setting. 1) Opinion of the setting. 1) Hilda's opinion of, or feeling about, the setting. 4 ) Opinion of Hilda. 5) Knowledge of Hilda's past. FIRST PERSON NARRATIVE The passage below is taken from the opening to On The Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969): I I FIRST met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serioucreampuffsthat I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road. when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform schooL I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderfully intellectual (5 things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was 1.0 coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou. One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, 1.5 the first time in New York. with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at Both Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hectors, and since then Hectors cafeteria has always been a 7 big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on 3o beautiful big glazed cakes and creampufLs. AU this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this : 'Now, darling. here we are in New York and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Boone ;5' ville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans ...' and so on in the way that he had in those early days. 1) Give an example of the narrator's knowledge of Dean Moriarty's past. 2) How does the narrator substantiate his knowledge of dean's past' Where did he obtain it' 3) What three adjectives are used to convey the narrator's attitude towards Dean when he first learnt about him from Chad King' 4) Whose attitude is being expressed in the descriptiion of Marylou (line 26)' 5) Why does the narrator include the report of Dean's words to Marylou (lines 32 ff )' What do we learn about Dean from this short speech - including the way it is said' How might a thir d person omniscient narrative have conveyed this information' 6) What is your attitude towards the narrator at this stage' What have you learnt about him' Do you trust him and his version of Dean Moriarty's story'