The Feast Of Love Charles Baxter Analysis

The narrative voice is the perspective of a novel, and it is through this voice that the reader receives and becomes connected to the story. This voice can appear in a variety of ways; for example, one common perspective is first person point of view, through which the narrator speaks directly to the reader by using personal pronouns such as ‘I.’ By creating a character that speaks directly to the reader, they become personally tied to what the narrator is telling them. In this way the reader must come to rely on what the character divulges to them, similar to the way a person might need to when talking to another person. The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter, takes this common perspective and twists it in a unique and influential way. Baxter adapts the first person point of view his own way by creating a character named after himself, who collects other peoples’ stories and compiles them into the book. Therefore, he creates the illusion that The Feast of Love could very easily be based on true stories he actually collected himself, although it is clearly …show more content…
The chapters are never labelled, but instead the main voice, Baxter, introduces them once and then allows the reader the ability to figure out for himself who the narrator for each chapter is. This gives the reader a one on one connection with each character individually. It is similar to the way one might recognize a person’s voice, the reader becomes acquainted with each style of writing and associates it with each character. Oftentimes, when chapters are broken up by character the reader would become disconnected with the others, but this does not occur in The Feast of Love, because although each character narrates a section, the other characters often appear in their stories linking each part together and allowing the reader the sense of a story but also the sense of each