Narration

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Narration
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Narration

• Narration refers to the act of telling a story,
  whether in prose or in verse, and the means by
  which that telling is accomplished.

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Voice

• The narrator of a literary work is the one who
  tells the story.
• His or her identity differs from that of the
  author, because the narrator is always in some
  sense the authors invention.
• The narrator often differs notably from the
  author in age, gender, outlook, or circumstances.

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Voice

• Twains Huck Finn is narrated by a barely
  literate teenage boy
• Langston Hughess dramatic monologue Mother to
  Son is narrated by a poor, aging woman
• Edgar Allan Poes The Cask of Amontillado is
  told by a psychopathic murderer

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Voice

• In the previous works it is easy not to confuse
  the narrator with the author.
• In other cases, though, separating the author
  from the narrator is not so easy.
• When there is no clear distinction between the
  two, the narrator remains a quasi-fictional
  speaker, contrived for the purposes of the
  particular story.

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Voice

• Finally, the voice of the author, in the form of
  various convictions and values by which he or she
  judges characters and events as well as evokes
  judgments in the reader, stands behind every
  fictional narrative.

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Point of View

• Point of view can be identified by the pronoun
  that the narrator uses to recount events.
• I (or occasionally we) for first-person
• He, She, They for third-person
• You for the rarely used second-person

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First-Person

• The first-person point of view has the advantages
  of immediacy and directness.
• It invites the reader to engage with a speaker
  who seems to be relating first-hand experience.
• In the following passage, Huck Finn, who has been
  living the hardscrabble but unconfined life of a
  homeless orphan, describes the trials of
  undergoing the kindly widow Douglass attempts to
  sivilize him

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First-Person Huck Finn

• The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor
  lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other
  names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.
  She put me in them new clothes again, and I
  couldnt do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel
  all cramped up. Well, then the old thing
  commenced again. The widow rung a bell for
  supper, and you had to come to time. When you
  got to the table you couldnt go right to eating,
  but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down
  her head and grumble a little over the victuals,
  though there warnt really anything the matter
  with them. That is, nothing only everything was
  cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends
  it is different things get mixed up, and the
  juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.

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First-Person Huck Finn

• The narration has a freshness and authenticity,
  from Hucks homely idioms to his restlessness
  under the regimen imposed by the social graces to
  his mistaking of the widows saying of grace at
  the table for grumbling.

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First-Person

• The first-person also imposes limitations on the
  teller, however
• The narrator can only relate what he or she might
  have witnessed, and then only with the degree of
  understanding and objectivity appropriate to his
  or her circumstances and character.

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First-Person

• A narrator who is a child, such as Huck Finn, or
  whose mind is afflicted, such as Poes paranoid
  speaker, cannot convincingly present a situation
  with the depth or subtlety of a more
  sophisticated or better balanced speaker.
• Nor can a first-person narrator logically
  describe the process of his or her own death.
• Epistolary novelfirst-person narration told in
  the form of letters.

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Third-Person

• The third-person point of view presents a
  narrator that has a much broader view, and
  usually, an objective perspective on characters
  and events.
• Third-person narration falls into two major
  subtypes.

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Omniscient

• An omniscient third-person narrator can enter the
  consciousness of any character, evaluate motives
  and explain feelings, and recount the background
  and predict the outcome of situations.

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Limited

• A limited third-person narrator involves a
  narrator who describes events only from the
  perspective and with the understanding of one, or
  sometimes, a select few characters.

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Omniscient Example

• George Eliots Middlemarch (1872) is a story
  that takes place in Victorian England that takes
  us into the thoughts and motives of a wide
  variety of characters during courtship and
  marriage and covers such broad social issues as
  political activism, religion, the ethics of
  financial investment, womens rights, and the
  development of medical science.

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More Omniscient

• Stephen Cranes short story The Open Boat
  (1897-98) follows the fortunes of four
  shipwrecked men as they try to reach land safely
  in their small lifeboat
• E.M. Foresters A Passage to India (1924)
  recounts the complex tensions and bonds among
  various English officials and tourists and the
  native Indian population during the British Raj.
• Here is a passage from Foresters novel in which
  the all-knowing narrator reveals the chance
  circumstances and misunderstandings that lead to
  the disastrous Anglo-Indian excursion at the
  heart of the book

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A Passage to India

• These hills look romantic in certain lights and
  at suitable distances, and seen of an evening
  from the upper verandah of the club they caused
  Miss Quested to say conversationally to Miss
  Derek that she should like to have gone, and that
  Dr. Aziz at Mr. Fieldings had said he would
  arrange something, and that Indians seem rather
  forgetful. She was overheard by the servant who
  offered them vermouths. This servant understood
  English. And he was not exactly a spy, but he
  kept his ears open, and Mahmoud Ali did not
  exactly bribe him, but did encourage him to come
  and squat with his own servants, and would happen
  to stroll their way when he was there. As the
  story traveled, it accreted emotion and Aziz
  learnt with horror that the ladies were deeply
  offended with him, and expected an invitation
  daily. He thought his facile remark had been
  forgotten. Endowed with two memories, a
  temporary and a permanent, he had hitherto
  relegated the caves to the former. Now he
  transferred them once and for all, and pushed the
  matter through. They were to be a splendid
  replica of the tea party.

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A Passage to India

• The narrator is omniscient because it is assumed
  that he knows and can reveal everything about
  these characters and their situations.
• From the off-handed nature of the Englishwomans
  remark to the means by which it is overheard by
  an eavesdropping servant to the grapevine of
  gossip by which it reaches, in greatly
  exaggeration form, the original source of the
  invitation.
• He also takes us into the consciousness of Dr.
  Aziz, to disclose both the well-meaning
  casualness with which he had offered to show the
  English ladies the hills and his eager resolve to
  set things right.

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More Omniscient

• The advantages of the omniscient point of view
  are the aura of wisdom and authority that it
  suggests and the unlimited range of material that
  it can cover.
• It can, however, create a feeling of distance,
  and so reduce the degree of connection between
  readers and characters.

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Omniscient Intrusive

• An omniscient narrator who offers philosophical
  or moral commentary on the characters and the
  events he depicts is called an intrusive
  narrator.
• Especially popular in nineteenth-century fiction.

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Example

• In William Makepeace Thackerays Vanity Fair, the
  narration is punctuated by sly, often ironic
  judgments on the motives and actions of the
  characters as well as on contemporary mores.
• After quoting a long, obsequious speech to a
  wealthy heiress by a man eager to gain her
  friendship for himself and his daughters, the
  narrator interrupts the story to comment

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Example

• There is little doubt that old Osborne believed
  all he said, and that the girls were quite
  earnest in their protestations of affection for
  Miss Swartz. People in Vanity Fair fasten on to
  rich folks quite naturally. If the simplest
  people are disposed to look not a little kindly
  on great Prosperity, (for I defy any member of
  the British public to say that the notion of
  Wealth has not something awful and pleasing to
  him and you, if you are told that the man next
  to you at dinner has got half a million, not to
  look at him with a certain interest)if the
  simple look benevolently on money, how much more
  do your old worldlings regard it! Their
  affections rush out to meet and welcome money.

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Explanation of Example

• The narrators irony is signaled by his exposure
  of the real motive for Osbornes sudden
  affection in Miss Swartzs Wealth,
  capitalized along with Prosperity for extra
  emphasis.
• Also, he extends the target of his satire to
  involve not only the people in Vanity Fair, the
  stereotype of society that he is depicting, but
  any member of the British public, including, in
  a sudden shift to the second-person point of
  view, the reader at a hypothetical dinner party.

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Third-Person Objective

• A third-person narrator whose presence is merely
  implied is called an objective narrator.
• That subtler technique, more favored in recent
  times, is exemplified in such works as Bernard
  Malamuds The Assistant (1957), a novel about a
  lonely young drifter who is inspired by his
  relationship with a warm Jewish family to change
  his religion and way of life.
• It is also prevalent in many works by Hemingway.

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Third-Person Objective

• In Hemingways short story, The End of
  Something, the protagonist, Nick Adams, has just
  admitted to his girlfriend that he no longer
  loves her. They have been fishing, and she
  responds only that she is going to take the
  rowboat back while he walks. He offers to push
  it off for her, and the story ends with the
  following section

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Example

• You dont need to, she said. She was afloat
  in the boat on the water with the moonlight on
  it. Nick went back and lay down with his face in
  the blanket by the fire. He could hear Marjorie
  rowing on the water.
• Hey lay there for a long time. He lay there
  while he heard Bill come into the clearing,
  walking around the woods. He felt Bill come up
  to the fire. Bill didnt touch him, either.
• Did she go all right? Bill said.
• Oh, yes, Nick said, lying, his face in the
  blanket.
• Have a scene?
• No, there wasnt any scene.
• How do you feel?
• Oh, go away, Bill! Go away for a while. Bill
  selected a sandwich from the lunch basket and
  walked over to have a look at the rods.

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Example Explained

• We are left to infer the characters feelings
  from the spare, matter-of-fact report of their
  dialogue and their actions Nicks depression
  and guilt over the breakup, signaled especially
  by his prone position, hiding his face in the
  blanket, and by his curt replies Marjories hurt
  and determination not to react and Bills half
  well-meaning, half prying curiosity, which
  provokes Nicks irritation.

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Narration in Drama

• In drama, there is usually no intermediary
  between audience and characters each of the
  characters speaks in an individual voice, which
  the author has created for him or her.
• The exception is a narrator in a play, a
  character who stands outside the action and
  comments on the characters and events, addressing
  the audience directly.

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Example

• In Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, the
  narrator, Tom Wingfield, is an older version of
  the character Tom in the main plot.
• He is depicted as recounting his memories of his
  dysfunctional family.
• He keeps pausing the action to foreshadow events
  and evaluate the feelings and motives of the
  characters, including his younger self.

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Example

• In Shakespeares Henry V, there is a Chorusa
  single person whose initial function is to urge
  the audience to use their imaginations in order
  to attain what the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor
  Coleridge would later term a willing suspension
  of disbelief and persuade themselves that they
  are seeing not actors performing in the lowly
  wooden O of the Globe Theatre but the vasty
  fields of France and the two mighty monarchies
  that the play will depict.

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Example

• As the action continues, the functions of the
  Chorus become more diverse.
• He appears before each of the five acts and at
  the end, in the Epilogue, to bridge distances in
  time and place, create suspense about upcoming
  conflicts, pass judgment on characters and
  events, and, above all, glorify the plays hero,
  this Star of England.

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Example

• By Shakespeares day, Henry V had been dead
  nearly two hundred years and, in his capacity as
  the last English king to rule both England and
  France, was lionized.
• The play itself presents a considerably more
  complex, less idealized depiction of Henry, but
  the Chorus continually speaks in the voice of the
  kings champion he is perhaps Shakespeares
  concession to both popular appeal and to the
  court censors.

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More Limited Stuff

• Remember, a limited point of view restricts the
  point of view to the understanding and experience
  of one or, in some cases, of a few characters.
• One example is in James Joyces A Painful Case,
  which focuses on the perspective of a wizened
  intellectual who discovers too late that he has
  rejected the one person who has ever loved him.

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Example

• In the following scene, the protagonist, Mr.
  Duffy, is reacting to a newspaper account of the
  womans death, which includes the information
  that in the four years since he ended their
  relationship, she has continued to be neglected
  by her husband and grown daughter, taken to
  drink, and died by walking in front of a train

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Example

• As he sat there, living over his life with her
  and evoking alternately the two images in which
  he now conceived her, he realized that she was
  dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had
  become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease.
  He asked himself what else could he have done.
  He could not have lived with her openly. He had
  done what seemed to him best. How was he to
  blame? Now that she was gone he understood how
  lonely her life must have been, sitting night
  after night alone in that room. His life would
  be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to
  exist, became a memoryif anyone remembered him.

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Example Explained

• The limited perspective follows Duffy from
  growing discomfort with his former
  self-righteousness to a first realization of his
  own guilt to sudden empathy for the womans
  situation to the realization that has doomed
  himself to share her terrible loneliness.

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Stream of Consciousness

• An extreme form of the third-person limited point
  of view is the stream of consciousness technique,
  which is used to replicate the thought processes
  of a character, with little or no intervention by
  the narrator.
• The running meditation may include sensory
  impressions, memories, opinions, and insights,
  organized by free association, in just the
  digressive form that it might follow in real life.

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Stream of Consciousness

• Some authors that favored stream of consciousness
  include
• William Faulkner
• The Sound and the Fury
• James Joyce
• Ulysses
• A man named Leopold Bloom is not a classical
  Greek hero, but a middle class Irish Jew
• He doesnt wander for 10 years across the
  Mediterranean, but through Dublin for a single
  day, June 16, 1904.
• His wife is not a paragon of devotion, like
  Penelope, but the promiscuous Molly, whom he
  nevertheless loves passionately

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Example

• Rover cycleshop. Those races are on today. How
  long ago is that? Year Phil Gilligan died. We
  were in Lombard street west. Wait, was in
  Thoms. Got the job in Wisdom Helys year we
  married. Six years. Ten years ago ninety-four
  he died, yes thats right the big fire at
  Arnotts. Val Dillon was lord mayor. The
  Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert OReilly
  emptying the port into his soup before the flag
  fell, Bobbob lapping it for the inner alderman.
  Couldnt hear what the band played. For what we
  have already received may the Lord make us.
  Milly was a kiddy then. Molly had the
  elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs.
  Mantailored with selfcovered buttons. She didnt
  like it because I sprained my ankle first day she
  wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that.
  Old Goodwins tall hat done up with some sticky
  stuff. Flies picnic too. Never put a dress on
  her back like it. Fitted her like a glove,
  shoulder and hips. Just beginning to plump it
  out well. Rabbitpie we had that day. People
  looking after her.
• Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was
  with the red wallpaper, Dockrells, one and
  ninepence a dozen. Millys tubbing night.
  American soap I bought elderflower. Cosy smell
  of her bathwater. Funny she looked soaped all
  over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor
  papas daguerreotype atelier he told me of.
  Hereditary taste.

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Example Explained

• The allusive, highly subjective nature of the
  style leaves some points unclear, such as
  personal references, many of which are explained
  elsewhere in the book, and peculiarly Irish
  institutions.
• For example, Milly is the Blooms daughter, now
  a teenager, and the photography reference is to
  her new job in a photographers shop.
• The political offices mentionedlord mayor and
  aldermanrefer to the city government, and the
  businesses, such as Wisdom Helys, to local
  establishments.
• The style is fragmented and elliptical, sentences
  like the grace said at the dinner and Blooms
  dismissal of the basis for Mollys superstition
  about the bad luck she associated with her dress
  (As if that) are left incomplete.

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Example Explained

• The characterization of Bloom that emerges from
  this process is moving and believable the way
  that he measures the passing of time by means of
  ordinary events in his life, relishes the memory
  of his young wifes budding voluptuousness and of
  a dress that was especially flattering to it, and
  cherishes a recollection of his childs bath
  night, when she was snug and secure and the
  couple united, happier then than they are in
  the troublesome present.
• We also experience first-hand Blooms sense of
  humorhis amusement at the slapstick of Bobbob
  lapping the port with which he has spiked his
  soup for the sake of his inner aldermanas well
  as his responsiveness to physical sensations in
  the description of Mollys clinging
  elephantgrey dress and the cosy smell of
  Millys soapy bath water.

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Example Explained

• His humane sympathies also come out, in his
  tender recollection of the little Milly and of
  his poor papa, the sadness tempered by the
  consolation that his father has bequeathed to his
  granddaughter his interest in photography.
• The freshness and scope allowed by such direct
  access to his thought processin the next
  paragraph, Bloom himself calls it a stream of
  lifehelp make him a fully three-dimensional and
  highly appealing character.

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Final Thoughts on 3rd Person Limited

• The third-person limited has the advantages of
  both the immediacy of the first person and the
  authority and range of the third person
  omniscient.
• It is the most frequently used point of view.

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Second-Person

• The third major point of view is the
  second-person, in which the narrator addresses
  the audience directly using the pronoun you,
  and assumes that the audience is experiencing the
  events along with the narrator.
• The implied audience may be the reader, a
  character who appears later in the story, or a
  listener who is never identified, such as a
  therapist in whom the narrator is confiding.

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Second-Person

• It occurs most frequently as a temporary
  departure from one of the other points of view.

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Example

• Holden Caufield, the troubled teenage
  first-person narrator in The Catcher in the Rye,
  introduces the younger sister he adores and then
  says several times with uncharacterized
  enthusiasm, Youd like herI swear to God youd
  like her.
• Whether Holden is speaking to a sympathetic
  reader or to one of the doctors at the crumby
  place where he tells us on the first page, he
  has been sent to recover from some madman stuff
  he has suffered, the shift in both his
  perspective and his attitude are striking.

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Example

• John Cheevers The Swimmer is a third-person
  limited story about an apparently carefree
  suburbanite who decides to return home after an
  afternoon poolside party by swimming across the
  intervening pools owned by his neighbors.
• One of the first hints of the devastating truth
  about his situation comes in a sudden switch to
  the second-person point of view as he waits to
  cross a busy, littered highway

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Example

• Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day
  you might have seen him, close to naked, standing
  on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a
  chance to cross. You might have wondered if he
  was the victim of foul play, had his car broken
  down, or was he merely a fool.
• His vulnerability and isolation foreshadow the
  terrible emptiness that awaits him at his
  journeys end.

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Second Person

• The use of second-person point of view is
  relatively rare.
• While it has the immediacy of the first-person,
  it can have the off-putting effects of seeming
  highly self-conscious and of calling constant
  attention to the process of narration.
• It also limits the kinds of scenes that can
  effectively be related through such constant
  back-and-forth involvement between narrator and
  audience.

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El Fin