Forms of presentation: narration
The sequence of events, character collisions may be represented in a variety of ways: through narration, description, dialogue, and characterization, which are the basic forms of presentation.
NARRATION/ POINT OF VIEW
Narration is the presentation of events in their development. The narration may be done in the first person (the narrator combines two functions: that of a character of a story and that of the narrator) and in the third person (the narrator does not take part in the events).
Point of View is quite simply, who is telling the story, who is describing and commenting on the events. All literature must be narrated or recorded by someone, and an author must decide who that someone will be. The decision is an important one, since the selection of a narrator determines the perspective, or point of view, from which the story will be told, as well as the amount and kind of information the reader will be given. Once the author has chosen the point of view, he/she must then convey it to the reader and keep it consistent from beginning to end. Many writers use the protagonist (the main character) as the point of view. Others create an impartial character to narrate the story or use multiple narrators. In discussing literature, it is most common to examine the following points of view.
First Person Narrator: A character in the story who speaks in the first person voice. The first person narrator is a character in the story who can reveal his or her feelings and thoughts, or information that has been directly received by other characters. The first person narrator speaks in the first person, i.e. in the “I” voice, saying “I saw…”, “I knew…”, “I realized…”, etc. Information is limited to what the point of view character/narrator sees, hears, thinks, experiences, and feels. First person allows the reader to feel an emotional connection with the main character/narrator that is difficult to achieve with other points of view. It can result in some powerful and emotionally charged scenes.
First person point of view is divided into the following categories:
Subjective Narrator. The point of view character gives his/her thoughts and feelings along with the events in the story.
Objective Narrator. The point of view character tells the events only without including his/her reactions to them.
Multiple Narrators. First person accounts by several characters.
Third Person Narrator: third person is perhaps the most common point of view. It allows the writer more freedom than any of the other points of view. It provides the most information to the reader but does so in an impersonal way which may lessen the emotional impact.
There are three basic types of third person narrators:
Third Person Objective Narrator: A narrator, who is not a character in the story, speaks in the third person voice and can tell only what is observable through the five senses. The third person objective narrator is not a character in the story. The third person objective narrator refers to all characters in the third person, i.e. tells the story in the “he/she/it” voice, saying “He looked…”, “She jumped…”, etc. They are only able to make objective observations, however they have no knowledge of what is going on in the mind of the characters, or anything else that would not be observable to the reader if they were to enter the story. In other words, they describe what the characters say or do without offering information on the characters thoughts, feelings or reactions.
Third Person Omniscient Narrator: A narrator, who is not a character in the story, speaks in the third person voice and can tell the thoughts and feelings of characters within the story. Like the third person objective narrator, the third person omniscient narrator speaks in the third person and is not a character in the story. Unlike the third person objective narrator, however, the third person omniscient narrator has knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of all characters in the story.
Third Person Limited Narrator: A narrator is not a character in the story, speaks in the third person voice and can describe the thoughts and feelings of only one character in the story (usually the main one). This narrator is similar to first person in that the information is presented primarily through the eyes of one character. For example, a sentence from a story in the third person limited may read, “As she waited on the corner, she remembered the last time she had seen him”.
Exercise 1.
Read the following ways of describing an event (a — e). Then match them with the five points of view listed below (1 — 5).
Mary Evans was driving home. There had been problems at the office again that day. And at home, the behavior of her husband, Nick, had changed recently. Suddenly a man stepped out in front of the car. Mary braked, but the car hit the man and he fell to the ground. The blood drained from Mary’s face, and she sat motionless behind the steering-wheel. A woman ran over and shouted to her through the window, but she didn’t reply.
I was walking home along Seymour Road. The evening was fine, and I was looking forward to dinner at my local restaurant. Suddenly I heard a screech of brakes and looked around. I recognized Mary Evans’s car, and saw a man in front of it, and then heard the horrible thud of body against car. I ran over. Mary had gone completely white. I shouted “Mary! Mary!” through the window, but she was obviously in a state of shock, and didn’t seem to recognize me at all.
Mary Evans was driving home after yet another difficult day. Doubts and fears about her job and her marriage tormented her. Her worries were well founded: her boss was increasingly dissatisfied with her work, and more importantly, her husband, Nick, was thinking of leaving her. Suddenly a man on the pavement, lost in worries of his own, stepped into the road without looking. Mary braked hard, but too late. The man was knocked to the ground. Mary’s friend, Anna, who was passing, ran over to her, but Mary was too shocked to speak or even think.
Mary Evans was driving home, wondering what to do about the problems that had come up at the office that day, and her boss’s obvious displeasure. And Nick, her husband, how would he behave when she got home? If only she knew why he was behaving so strangely! Suddenly there was a man in front of the car. Instinctively, her foot pushed hard on the brake. The man’s terrified face appeared in front of her for an instant, then disappeared again. Everything seemed to go blank. From what seemed a million miles away, someone was calling her name.
It had been another awful day at the office, one problem after another, and my boss criticizing me all the time. And I wasn’t looking forward to my evening very much either. My husband, Nick, had been acting strangely all week — I really worry about losing him. I just wasn’t thinking about my driving, and the next thing I knew there was a man right in front of me. I remember braking, but it was too late — there was nothing I could do. I can’t remember any more.
first-person narrator: a minor character in the story
first-person narrator: a main character in the story
third-person narrator: omniscient
third-person narrator: objective
third-person narrator: limited
Exercise 2.
Choose one of the following moments. Imagine who is there and what happens. Choose a point of view and narrate the scene in 5 — 10 sentences.
an hour later, Mary at the hospital;
Mary at home, later that evening;
Mary at the police station;
any other moment from how you think the plot may develop.
Read the short-story and answer the questions that follow it.
T. Capote
A Lamp in a Window
Once I was invited to a wedding; the bride suggested I drive up from New York with a pair of other guests, a Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, whom I had never met before. It was a cold April day, and on the ride to Connecticut the Robertses, a couple in their early forties, seemed agreeable enough — no one you would want to spend a long weekend with, but not bad.
However, at the wedding a great deal of liquor was consumed, I should say a third of it by my chauffeurs. They were the last to leave the party — at approximately 11 p. m. — and I was most wary of accompanying them; I knew they were drunk, but I didn’t realize how drunk. We had driven about twenty miles, the car weaving considerably, and Mr. and Mrs. Roberts insulting each other in the most extraordinary language, when Mr. Roberts, very understandably, made a wrong turn and got lost on a dark country road. I kept asking them, finally begging them, to stop the car and let me out, but they were so involved in their invectives that they ignored me. Eventually the car stopped of its own accord (temporarily) when it swiped against the side of a tree. I used the opportunity to jump out of the car’s back door and run into the woods. Presently the cursed vehicle drove off, leaving me alone in the icy dark. I’m sure my hosts never missed me; Lord knows I didn’t miss them.
But it wasn’t a joy to be stranded out there on a windy cold night. I started walking, hoping I’d reach a highway. I walked for half an hour without sighting a habitation. Then, just off the road, I saw a small frame cottage with a porch and a window lighted by a lamp. I tiptoed onto the porch and looked in the window; an elderly woman with soft hair and a round pleasant face was sitting by a fireside reading a book. There was a cat curled in her lap, and several others slumbering at her feet.
I knocked at the door, and when she opened it I said, with chattering teeth: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve had a sort of accident; I wonder if I could use your phone to call a taxi.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, smiling. “I’m afraid I don’t have a phone. Too poor. But please, come in.” And as I stepped through the door into the cozy room, she said: “My goodness, boy. You’re freezing. Can I make coffee? A cup of tea? I have a little whiskey my husband left — he died six years ago.”
I said a little whiskey would be very welcome.
While she fetched it I warmed my hands at the fire and glanced around the room. It was a cheerful place occupied by six or seven cats of varying alley-cat colors. I looked at the title of the book Mrs. Kelly — for that was her name, as I later learned — had been reading: it was Emma by Jane Austen, a favorite writer of mine.
When Mrs. Kelly returned with a glass of ice and a dusty quarter-bottle of bourbon, she said: “Sit down, sit down. It’s not often I have company. Of course, I have my cats. Anyway, you’ll spend the night? I have a nice little guest room that’s been waiting such a long time for a guest. In the morning you can walk to the highway and catch a ride into town, where you’ll find a garage to fix your car. It’s about five miles away.”
I wondered aloud how she could live so isolatedly, without transportation or a telephone; she told me her good friend, the mailman, took care of all her shopping needs. “Albert. He’s really so dear and faithful. But he’s due to retire next year. After that I don’t know what I’ll do. But something will turn up. Perhaps a kindly new mailman. Tell me, just what sort of accident did you have?”
When I explained the truth of the matter, she responded indignantly: “You did exactly the right thing. I wouldn’t set foot in a car with a man who had sniffed a glass of sherry. That’s how I lost my husband. Married forty years, forty happy years, and I lost him because a drunken driver ran him down. If it wasn’t for my cats…” She stroked an orange tabby purring in her lap.
We talked by the fire until my eyes grew heavy. We talked about Jane Austen (“Ah, Jane. My tragedy is that I’ve read all her books so often I have them memorized”), and other admired authors: Thoreau, Willa Cather, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Hawthorne, Chekhov, De Maupassant — she was a woman with a good and varied mind; intelligence illuminated her hazel eyes like the small lamp shining on the table beside her. We talked about the hard Connecticut winters, politicians, far places (“I’ve never been abroad, but if ever I’d had the chance, the place I would have gone is Africa. Sometimes I’ve dreamed of it, the green hills, the heat, the beautiful giraffes, the elephants walking about”), religion (“Of course, I was raised a Catholic, but now, I’m almost sorry to say, I have an open mind. Too much reading, perhaps”), gardening (“I grow and can all my vegetables, a necessity”). At last: “Forgive my babbling on. You have no idea how much pleasure it gives me. But it’s way past your bedtime. I know it is mine.”
She escorted me upstairs, and after I was comfortably arranged in a double bed under a blissful load of pretty scrapquilts, she returned to wish me goodnight, sweet dreams. I lay awake thinking about it. What an exceptional experience — to be an old woman living alone here in the wilderness and have a stranger knock on your door in the middle of the night and not only open it but warmly welcome inside and offer him shelter. If our situations had been reversed, I doubt that I would have had the courage, to say nothing of the generosity.
The next morning she gave me breakfast in her kitchen. Coffee and hot oatmeal with sugar and tinned cream, but I was hungry and it tasted great. The kitchen was shabbier than the rest of the house; the stove, a rattling refrigerator, everything seemed on the edge of expiring. All except one large, somewhat modern object, a deep-freeze that fitted into a corner of the room.
She was chatting on: “I love birds. I feel so guilty about not tossing them crumbs during the winter. But I can’t have them gathered around the house. Because of the cats. Do you care for cats?”
“Yes, I once had a Siamese named Toma. She lived to be twelve, and we traveled everywhere together. All over the world. And when she died I never had the heart to get another.”
“Then maybe you will understand this,” she said, leading me over to the deep-freeze, and opening it. Inside was nothing but cats: stacks of frozen, perfectly preserved cats — dozens of them. It gave me an odd sensation. “All my old friends. Gone to rest. It’s just that I couldn’t bear to lose them. Completely.” She laughed, and said: “I guess you think I’m a bit dotty.”
A bit dotty. Yes, a bit dotty, I thought as I walked under grey skies in the direction of the highway she had pointed out to me. But radiant: a lamp in a window.
1.
Define the story-type.
2. Is the plot of the short story organized according to the traditional structure? Did the author resort to any plot-structure techniques to make it more complex?
3. Consider different elements of the setting of the story. In what way does the setting help to disclose the heroine’s personality?
4. State the type of presentation employed in the story. Through whose point of view are the events related?
5. Recall your immediate reaction to the story. What feeling did the main character provoke in you?
6. Did the narrator’s attitude toward the main heroine change in the end of the story? Interpret the last sentence of the text describing her.
UNIT 5
FORMS OF PRESENTATION: DESCRIPTION
Description is a presentation of a static picture: the atmosphere, the scenery, the portrait, the interior and the like. It serves to depict the state of things in detail. It is characterized by the use of mostly compound nominal predicates. Emphasis is put on attributes, predicatives and other qualifying features.
MEANS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
One way in which writers make their descriptions vivid and exciting is by using emotionally coloured and evaluative words. Fiction as all other art-forms appeals to the reader through the senses and evokes responsive emotions. In fiction the representation of reality can never be entirely neutral; in every literary work the writer’s attitude to the characters and events is reflected in the tone, which is conveyed through emotive-coloured lexis.
Vocabulary, or lexis, employed by authors in their works, mean the choice of words. There are grammatical words (articles, demonstratives, pronouns, auxiliary words and coordinators) and semantic words, which we pay more attention while reading (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.). When you look them up in the dictionary the first meaning you find of these words is their denotation, or the most basic, literal meaning. Literature, however, communicates more than plain facts. It uses the connotations of words — ideas, associations and emotions they suggest — to influence our thoughts and feelings in more subtle ways. Connotations serve as bases for special language means of expressiveness — figures of speech, which interrelate language and thought, help to create an artistic literary work and the individual style of the author. The use of figures of speech involves the reader in the interpretation of the ideas which are not stated directly but implied. Below are some of the ways in which writers communicate their views indirectly.
Metaphor is a form of comparison in which an idea or opinion is expressed by comparing one thing with another to show a similarity. Words are used not in the true sense but in an imaginative way, transferring a quality from one object to another.
e. g. I am an island.
He is a bull when he is roused.
Simile is characterization of an object by comparing it with another object belonging to a different class of things and thus giving rise to a new understanding of it. Similes have formal elements in their structure: connective words such as like, as, seem, as if, such as, etc.
e. g. She sang like a kettle whistling as it boils.
He is as tall as a lamp-post.
The major difference between the metaphor and the simile is that the simile aims at finding some point of resemblance by keeping the objects apart (a is like b) while the metaphor aims at identifying the objects (a = b).
e. g. She was a feather in his arms. (a metaphor)
She was weightless like a feather in his arms. (a simile)
Epithet is characterization of a person, thing or phenomenon with the help of adjectives, nouns or attributive phrases. It serves to emphasize a certain property or feature and to express the author’s attitude toward what he describes.
e. g. She is really slim. — No, she isn’t. She is skinny.
The sick man gave a heart-breaking groan.
Irony is a figure of speech based on the simultaneous realization of two logical meanings — logical and contextual, which stand in opposition to each other. In fact, the writer says one thing but really means the opposite.
e. g. The food was so delicious that I took it home for my dog.
It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country without a penny in one’s pocket!
Hyperbole means deliberate exaggeration of an essential feature or property of an object, showing the author’s attitude to it (often humorous, ironic or overemotional).
e. g. I would give the world to make you happy.
He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face.
Personification takes place when an inanimate object or an animal is endowed with a quality typical of a human being for a definite emotional colouring.
e. g. The cold winter wind outside was crying and whining and cursing.
Zeugma is a stylistic device based on simultaneous realization of the literal and the transferred meanings of a word, when it is used in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to two adjacent words in the context. The zeugma often brings forth humorous connotations.
e. g. When he met Annette, who was to be his third wife, he gave her his heart and his wallet.
Pun is a humorous use of a word or a phrase which has two meanings or of two words or phrases which look or sound similar. Puns are used not only in jokes but also in ads, newspaper headlines, etc. because they are eye-catching and amusing.
e. g. You have to be rich to play golf. — Then why are there so many poor players?
Allusion is a reference to specific places, persons, literary or legendary characters or historical events. The most frequently resorted to sources are mythology and the Bible. The use of allusions presupposes knowledge of the fact, thing or person alluded to and calls forth associations from the reader’s thesaurus.
e.g. He says his mother-in-law is a perfect Gorgon.
Exercise 1.
What does the writer really think in each of the following sentences?
1. She danced as daintily as a cow.
2. He usually manages to bulldoze his way through the committee meetings.
3. Jasmine is so incredibly beautiful, dignified and intelligent as to be the eighth wonder of the world.
4. The new social centre is a tree growing naturally with strength and beauty to fit the environment in which it had been placed.
5. His unrivalled brilliance as a student of the physical sciences was aptly illustrated by his 10% in the physics examination.
6. I don’t want to be an island but a bridge.
7. His sarcasm often bites like an adder.
8. The furniture was about as comfortable as a cactus.
Exercise 2.
Sort out the sentences below into two groups tp indicate a positive or a negative opinion.
1. The car is incredibly, heartstoppingly beautiful.
2. My own life had been so respectable and sheltered in comparison.
3. Don’t be so childish!
4. It turned out the most ghastly place you can imagine.
5. You never saw such a barren, boring landscape in your life, like the surface of the moon in a heatwave.
6. Our wedding was particularly gruesome, with the two sets of totally incompatible relatives grinding and grating against each other.
7. Louise was small but shapely built.
8. He took it like a slap in the face.
9. Anne gave me a frosty look.
10. New York was certainly a disastrous choice.
Exercise 3.
What connotations do the following statements suggest?
1. But what can you expect from such a man? Do you find taste in the white of an egg?
2. I’ve managed to stop smoking; now I’m trying to stop nuclear power.
3. Last night I got back to my room wet with wine and good intentions.
4. One cannibal to another while eating a clown: “Does this taste funny to you?”
5. Happiness is like coke — something you get as by-product in the process of making something else.
6. I hate her hypocritical, pretentious, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth air.
7. Diana looks a million bucks today.
8. I wouldn’t trust Bill in your place — he is as treacherous as a snake.
Read the poem and answer the questions that follow it.
O. Wilde
Symphony in Yellow
An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moved against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale-green Thames
Lies like a road of rippled jade.
1.
Translate the title of the poem. What ideas does the choice of words
in the title suggest?
2. What is described in the poem? Through whose perception are the things shown?
3. Consider the vivid comparisons O. Wilde creates. What emotions do they suggest?
4. Do you think any of the metaphors or similes in the text are particularly effective?
5. What general mood do you think is created in the poem?
UNIT 6