It’s all just part of Harper Lee’s act, and she gives a virtuoso performance. But we do trust the author, Harper Lee, to show us Scout interpreting things incorrectly, like she does with these descriptions of Boo Radley. We don’t trust the narrator, Scout, to interpret everything correctly. For the rest of us, the story shows us more about how the little girl’s mind works than it does about her neighbor. Probably not-unless you’re six or seven yourself, in which case, the obvious response is to go peek in his windows. Oh, and when people’s flowers freeze during cold weather? It’s because this man has snuck out at night to breathe on them. She says he’s six-and-a-half feet tall and dines on raw squirrels and cats, which is why his hands, by the way, are always blood-stained, because if you eat a raw animal, you can never wash the blood off. Say a little girl comes up to you, six or seven years old, and starts telling you a story about the maniac who lives across the street. So when the novel states, “I told Atticus I didn’t feel very well and didn’t think I’d go to school any more if it was all right with him,” we know that’s Scout speaking. Part of her performance is to tell the story using the voice and perspective of one of the characters, a little girl named Scout. In the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for example, Harper Lee is the author. Your friend is just the person putting on the act. And so when he says, “I tied up that whipper-snapper and threw him in the trunk of my jalopy”-or whatever he says-we know it’s the grandfather telling the story. When that happens, it’s like we’re actually listening to the grandfather. We try to stop seeing our friend on the stage and focus on the performance. In fiction, we like to let ourselves be tricked. It’s the point of view the story is coming from. The narrator is the fictional construct the author has created to tell the story through. You know the author wrote the story, but is the author the one narrating it? In fiction, the answer is almost always no. This is exactly the confusion many students run into when they read a story on the page. In other words, what if she tells her grandfather’s story while pretending to be her grandfather. Or to take it a step further, what if she wrote it all down. Who’s the narrator? Easy! The grandfather.īut what if the situations aren’t so straightforward? What if your friend tells your grandfather’s story? What if she makes her voice deep and husky, like her grandfather’s, and starts using words like “whipper-snapper” and “jalopy.” What if she even starts saying the things that happened to him, happened to “me.” What if she did it on stage for a talent show, and it was all so perfect that it didn’t even seem like a joke. Afterward, maybe your friend’s grandfather sits you both down and tells a story from his childhood to teach you some valuable life lesson. Maybe your friend tells you a story to explain why she got grounded. So, in real life, we run into stories all the time, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell who the narrator is. Bushnell, Novelist and Oregon State University Senior Instructor of Literature Click HERE for Spanish Transcript)īy J.T. What is a Narrator? Transcript (Spanish and English Subtitles Available.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |