Narrative mode

Quest for self Morrison begins the novel with reference to the "Dick and Jane" reading primer. As the story-progresses, Morrison repeats the passage from the primer, first without punctuation, then without spacing between the words. This shows that while the words remain the same in the passage, there are missing elements creating a dysfunction of sorts. This example carries over to the main text. The reader finds a family; mother, father, sister and brother, but key elements are missing. Father…

Flannery O’Connor produced a short story—one that almost allows the reader to have free admission into their own objective thoughts—titled “The Lame Shall Enter First” (1965). However, the 3rd person narration is interrupted an unsettling number of times by one of the main character’s biases; O’Connor cannot help but include Sheppard’s own thoughts and feelings throughout the tale. In these instances, the opportunity is lost for the reader to draw their own conclusions on the narrative’s events.…

“The Peace Corps' Mission, To promote world peace and friendship by fulfilling three goals: To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women, To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served, To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.” Bruce Anders mentions the Peace Corps’ in his video presentation of the “Bride Finder” from the book The Quiet Time by Demitri Keriotis. Character…

a first-hand point of view of the situations which take place. The term was first established in Wayne C. Booth’s ‘The Rhetoric of Fiction’, and due to this view, some may say that due to McEwan’s incorporation of metafiction and a retrospective narrative, Joe Rose, the protagonist, can be viewed as an unreliable narrator. This therefore…

Heterogeneous Narrative Perspective Absalom, Absalom! is a novel written in 1936 by William Faulkner, the winner of two Pulitzer’s and a Nobel Peace prize for his many literary masterpieces. Faulkner has gained a celebrated reputation for his depiction of life in the American South. Though critics have established Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s most difficult writing, it is also revered for its intellectually enriching metaphors and the complicated spiraling of events through narration.…

In the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the underground” and LU XUN’S “Diary of a madman,” the idea of an unreliable narrator is deeply imbedded to make the reader deliberate twice of the situation at hand. In both writings, there are characters whose credibility has been seriously compromised. However, the characters in both writing differ in their levels of credibility and verge of insanity. Furthermore, both authors allude to the many social problems relevant in their society and…

Gérard Genette is a French literary theorist who developed the theory of narrative, which is the telling of a set of events or a story. The most basic terms from narratology are as follows; order, duration, frequency, voice and mood. The narrative of a story is traditionally told in chronological order, as this is a way for the story to be easily understood by its readers. However, by changing the time-frame of the story, the author is also changing their readers ways of reading and…

I will be analyzing and comparing how Jose Saramaga and Max Brooks portray multiple perspectives in their novels, Blindness and World War Z, and the importance the literary element had on the work as a whole. The novel, Blindness, was originally written in a different language and had been written much earlier than the novel, World War Z so it is important that we gain an understanding of how different languages display and bring to life different point of views, because both books heavily rely…

Looking But Not Seeing. Appreciably, blindness is a dominant theme woven through the garment of the “Cathedral” story by Raymond Carver. One is taken aback by the utter rawness and cold attitude exhibited by the narrator about the blind man. The narrator loudly wonders on who could dare attend a little wedding between Robert, the blind man and his sweetheart Beulah and further states that he does not have any blind person as a friend. As the story develops, one thing becomes certain that the…

Throughout Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez creates a narrator who is relied upon to retell a series of events, but ironically fails to do so. The narrator interviews people who tell him their depictions and memories of the murder of Santiago Nasar, which took place 27 years ago, so the retelling of events comes from a plethora of people and there are many different versions of the same story. This causes much confusion to readers because information comes from many…