Transcript Narration - Mrs. Friedrich's English Class

NARRATION
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.
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
author’s invention.
• The narrator often differs notably from the author in
age, gender, outlook, or circumstances.
VOICE
• Twain’s Huck Finn is narrated by a barely literate
teenage boy
• Langston Hughes’s dramatic monologue “Mother to
Son” is narrated by a poor, aging woman
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is told
by a psychopathic murderer
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.
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.
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
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 Douglas’s attempts to “sivilize”
him:
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 couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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 warn’t 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.
FIRST-PERSON: HUCK FINN
• The narration has a freshness and authenticity, from
Huck’s homely idioms to his restlessness under the
regimen imposed by the social graces to his
mistaking of the widow’s saying of grace at the
table for “grumbling.”
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.
FIRST-PERSON
• A narrator who is a child, such as Huck Finn, or
whose mind is afflicted, such as Poe’s 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 novel—first-person narration told in the
form of letters.
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.
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.
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.
OMNISCIENT EXAMPLE
• George Eliot’s 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, women’s
rights, and the development of medical science.
MORE OMNISCIENT
• Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” (189798) follows the fortunes of four shipwrecked men as
they try to reach land safely in their small lifeboat
• E.M. Forester’s 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 Forester’s 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:
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. Fielding’s 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.
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 Englishwoman’s 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.
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.
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.
EXAMPLE
• In William Makepeace Thackeray’s 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:
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.
EXPLANATION OF EXAMPLE
• The narrator’s irony is signaled by his exposure of the
real motive for Osborne’s sudden “affection” in Miss
Swartz’s “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.
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
Malamud’s 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.
THIRD-PERSON OBJECTIVE
• In Hemingway’s 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:
EXAMPLE
“You don’t 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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.
EXAMPLE EXPLAINED
• We are left to infer the characters’ feelings from the
spare, matter-of-fact report of their dialogue and
their actions: Nick’s depression and guilt over the
breakup, signaled especially by his prone position,
hiding his face in the blanket, and by his curt replies;
Marjorie’s hurt and determination not to react; and
Bill’s half well-meaning, half prying curiosity, which
provokes Nick’s irritation.
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.
EXAMPLE
• In Tennessee William’s 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.
EXAMPLE
• In Shakespeare’s Henry V, there is a Chorus—a
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.
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 play’s hero, “this Star of
England.”
EXAMPLE
• By Shakespeare’s 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 king’s
champion; he is perhaps Shakespeare’s concession
to both popular appeal and to the court censors.
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 Joyce’s “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.
EXAMPLE
• In the following scene, the protagonist, Mr. Duffy, is
reacting to a newspaper account of the woman’s
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:
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 memory—if anyone
remembered him.
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 woman’s situation to the realization that has
doomed himself to share her terrible loneliness.
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.
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 doesn’t 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:
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 Thom’s. Got the job in Wisdom
Hely’s year we married. Six years. Ten years ago: ninety-four he died, yes that’s right
the big fire at Arnott’s. Val Dillon was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman
Robert O’Reilly emptying the port into his soup before the flag fell, Bobbob lapping it
for the inner alderman. Couldn’t 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
didn’t like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore choir picnic at the
Sugarloaf. As if that. Old Goodwin’s 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, Dockrell’s, one
and ninepence a dozen. Milly’s tubbing night. American soap I bought: elderflower.
Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now
photography. Poor papa’s daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.
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
photographer’s shop.
• The political offices mentioned—”lord mayor” and “alderman”—
refer to the city government, and the businesses, such as
“Wisdom Hely’s,” to local establishments.
• The style is fragmented and elliptical, sentences like the grace
said at the dinner and Bloom’s dismissal of the basis for Molly’s
superstition about the bad luck she associated with her dress (“As
if that”) are left incomplete.
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 wife’s budding voluptuousness and of a dress that was
especially flattering to it, and cherishes a recollection of his child’s
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 Bloom’s sense of humor—his
amusement at the slapstick of “Bobbob” “lapping” the port with
which he has spiked his soup for the sake of his “inner
alderman”—as well as his responsiveness to physical sensations in
the description of Molly’s clinging “elephantgrey” dress and the
“cosy smell” of Milly’s soapy bath water.
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 process—in the next paragraph, Bloom
himself calls it a “stream of life”—help make him a fully
three-dimensional and highly appealing character.
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.
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.
SECOND-PERSON
• It occurs most frequently as a temporary departure
from one of the other points of view.
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, “You’d like her…I swear to
God you’d 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.
EXAMPLE
• John Cheever’s “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:
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 journey’s
end.
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 selfconscious 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.
EL FIN