Narrative Strategy In 'Outage' By John Updike

In the short story written by John Updike “Outage” one can see through the eyes of a few strategy texneks. Such as the Readers-Response, which looks at how a reader reacts to a written work throughout a reading. Another exilant strategy would be the Biographical strategy; in this strategy a reader doesn’t merely look at the written work but also takes into consideration the person who wrote the given work. Someone choosing to use the readers-response on the work “Outage” (or any work) might read the story with many personal biases based off how they understand the given scenario or dialogue. Social class, life style, education, religion, and many other factors would also come into play for each individual audience member. A …show more content…
A person with religiose values would find the forming scandle to be sinnful and uniproprate to indorse the ideas of affairs within a writen work. In the short story “Outage” the over all plot is rather simplistic; an every day man working from home is forced to take a break dew to a town power outage, which brings the community together and then also almost success in creating an affair between neighbors. Brad Morris, the work at home husband, goes to town to run arons after the outage and finds the whole town is in the dark. Brad gets to have a chance to see how people in his community would interact without electricity, internet etc. And see how the small community would bond over the currant situations denominator. Although all the busnesses are closed he is given specile treatment by a carictor named Olivia, one of the heath food store workers. She comes off as flutatiouse to the reader and to the chracter Brad …show more content…
Many critics of Updike cridicised that he “has for years been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy…and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author himself.” (LGOHD). Which if one was to compaire the works most would find that “Many of his protagonists played golf and cheated on their wives.” (LGOHD). It sounds as though Updike 's life as a writer was not mearly a creer or a hobby. But rather a way to live out his life in more ways than a human could have sugseeded within a lifetime. The ways he ways he wanted to live were not necisarly moral or a good example. However, an intresting artistic chanle to express himself and his work that shemingly endded up being repetative and predictable. Another one of Updikes critics once dimostritized that their “moral complaint was that Updike had tremendous, Nabokov-level talent and was wasting it, because he was too charmed by his daily dumps and too afraid of irregularity to take the kind of big literary risks that might have blocked him for a year or two.”