Narrative Point Of View Research Articles

Narrative Point of View: The Rhetoric of "Au Hasard, Balthazar"

Research Article| October 01 1977 Narrative Point of View: The Rhetoric of "Au Hasard, Balthazar" Nick Browne Nick Browne Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1977) 31 (1): 19–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/1211823 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nick Browne; Narrative Point of View: The Rhetoric of "Au Hasard, Balthazar". Film Quarterly 1 October 1977; 31 (1): 19–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1211823 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1977 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Narrative Point of View: The Rhetoric of "Au Hasard, Balthazar"

Narrative Point of View: The Rhetoric of "Au Hasard, Balthazar"

Stylistic Techniques Determined by Narrative Point of View in Mario Vargas Llosa's "Los Cachorros"

Stylistic Techniques Determined by Narrative Point of View in Mario Vargas Llosa's "Los Cachorros"

The End of Dickens's Apprenticeship: Variable Focus in Barnaby Rudge

1N A PERCEPTIVE RECENT STUDY, H. M. Daleski summarizes Charles Dickens's technical development as an attempt to understand and probe more deeply analogies between private and public conduct, to use analogy, as Steven Marcus suggests, to link together individual and social spheres-a technique which he perfects in Bleak House [1852-53], Little Dorrit [1855-57], and Our Mutual Friend [1864-65].' While importance of Dickens's art of analogy is incontestable, implication that Bleak House is first successful embodiment of technique must be disputed. His capsule summary of novelist's career is weakened by a distressingly common oversight. Studies of Dickens's craftsmanship have consistently ignored impressive experiments made in Barnaby Rudge (1841), although structural innovations of this work closely resemble justly admired fictional techniques of later masterpieces. In Barnaby, a decade before Bleak House, Dickens fully correlates the individual and social spheres of his novel through analogy. Further, his figurative as well as structural use of time and his creation of a cohesive narrative point of view make Barnaby Rudge a significant departure from episodic early books, a clear anticipation of organically unified late novels.

Conrad's Influence on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

CONRAD'S INFLUENCE ON FAULKNER'S ABSALOM, ABSALOM! Stephen M. Ross* William Faulkner knew Joseph Conrad's fiction thoroughly, and echoes of Conrad's stories appear in Faulkner's own, from his earliest stories to his late novels.1 Having read Conrad as early as the fourth grade, Faulkner continued to read him throughout his life, and consistently listed the Polish seaman among those few authors whose influence he would acknowledge—he explicitly admitted, for example, that his style gained "quite a bit from Conrad."2 Richard Adams sums up the extent of Conrad's influence as being "in the whole of Faulkner's work . . . the strongest and most pervasive . . . coming from any writer of prose fiction."3 Conrad's influence is nowhere more evident than in Absalom, Absalom!, where Faulkner has assimilated techniques, ideas and even scenes from various Conrad works, especially Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Albert Guerard, in his study of Conrad, points to Absalom, Absalom! as an extension and heightening of the essential methods of "Conradian impressionism," the methods "of that impressionism allegedly taught by Ford Madox Ford: a narrative method of deceptive emphasis and constantly shifting perspective, depending for much of its beauty on swift oscillations between the long view and the close, between the moralizing abstract and the highly visualized particular."4 The multiple narrative point of view, the frequent shifting back and forth in time, the emphasis on a single event (what Ford called "the Affair"5) viewed from varied perspectives, the progression deffect or gradual accretion of impressions through a series of separate, intense encounters with the central characters—Absalom, Absalom! shares all these techniques with Impressionism.6 Faulkner shared, too, certain of the aesthetic and epistemological assumptions underlying such techniques : the assumption that truth, or what Conrad called "that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask," comes to the reader only through great effort and involvement, only when he has been made to "hear," to "feel," and to "see";7 the assumption that conjecture can be a "Stephen M. Ross is an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University. 200Stephen M. Ross valid mode of comprehension; theassumption that theworld as it comes filtered through another's life can be fully as compelling (both for a character and for the reader) as "first-hand" experience. Such broad similarities between Absalom, Absalom! and Conrad's work have been discussed (by Guerard, Adams, Blotner, among others) ; but important details of Faulkner's "borrowing" from Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness need to be explored, for the specific similarities of technique and aesthetic premise point toward a deeper sharing of moral insight. Mr. Compson's story-telling, in Chapters Two, Three and Four of Absalom, Absalom!, and including the letter he sends Quentin at Harvard, echoes Lord Jim in rhetorical pattern, in its tone of narration, and even occasionally in imagery. lx>rd Jim breaks into three narrative sections: a brief introduction of Jim, rendered omnisciently; Marlow's lengthy "yarn," told on the hotel verandah; and the packet received by the "privileged man," in which Marlow concludes Jim's history. Similarly, Chapter Two of Absalom, Absalom! opens with an omniscient section introducing Sutpen (upon his arrival in Jefferson), followed (in Chapters Two, Three and Four) by Mr. Compson's version of the Sutpen tragedy, as he tells it to Quentin; Mr. Compson's role is completed when he sends the letter informing Quentin of Rosa Coldfield's death, the letter which triggers the final recreation of Sutpen's saga by Quentin and his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon . Lord Jim opens with a striking image of Jim dressed in white, walking straight toward one "with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull."8 He materializes suddenly, with the startling immediacy of a man met rounding a corner. The visual details evoke an impression of Jim that carries through the rest of his story, an image that remains essentially intact no matter how much later information alters and blurs its outline. Faulkner, too, builds Mr. Compson's speculations around a vivid picture of Thomas Sutpen; Chapter Two begins...

Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties by Max F. Schulz, and: The Comic Imagination in American Literature ed. by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., (review)

Studies in American Fiction119 Rovit's Ernest Hemingway (Twayne), also cheaper and more thorough than Shaw's book. University of North DakotaRobert W. Lewis Schulz, Max F. Bkck Humor Fiction of the Sixties. Athens: Ohio University Press. 156 pp. Cloth: $8.50 The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 448 pp. Cloth: $12.50. The sixties have barely concluded and already they have become the subject of a substantial body of literary interpretation, much of it concentrating on black humor, the mode with which the period may well turn out to be permanently identified. Like earlier studies, Bhck Humor Fiction of the Sixties attempts a representative rather than a comprehensive definition of the genre, here concentrating on Barth, Vonnegut, Borges, Bruce J. Friedman, Leonard Cohen, Thomas Berger, Charles Wright, and Robert Coover. Characteristically, Schulz identifies the collective vision of these figures as one of a disintegrating world, unredeemed by a coherent order and consequently able to sustain only discontinuous states of being, in short an absurd universe. Schulz, however, makes a valuable distinction in seeing the black humor response to the "cosmic labyrinth" not as a constant mode of apprehending experience but as the product of a specific cultural context. Distinct from the sick jokes of Lenny Bruce, the theatrically absurd comedy of Joseph Heller, even from the existential assertion of self that marks the work of Saul Bellow, the operative term in his definition is "multiple possibilities." Arbitrarily suspending choices, he feels, black humor fosters a solipsism that itself becomes the object of its own ironic scrutiny, viewing reality as a constantly shifting series of masks or disguises. Through such open ended pluralism, however, the constriction of events, of identities, of value systems which obscure reality may be at least encountered if not overcome. In developing this thesis, Schulz's emphasis on culture remains chiefly attributive rather than demonstrable. That is to say, other than suggesting literary antecedents in the heroes of Scott's Waverly romances, who are similarly confronted with anxieties rising from fluid social conditions, Schulz does not identify either a literary tradition or an immediate historical context in which black humor may be seen. The cultural background he does provide is limited to comparisons with contemporary painting and sculpture. There is no direct examination of cultural phenomena as is given by critics such as Irving Howe, for whom the problem of personal identity in postmodern fiction emerges as a consequence of estrangement from the meanings afforded by a recognizable social order or by Leslie Fiedler, whose futurist projections conversely see that fiction turning to strategies of pornography and obscenity, finally to silence as a fulfillment of the cultural drive toward anti-rationalism. Schulz, accordingly, contents himself with identifying the dilemma raised in black humor rather than offering a perspective in which it may be evaluated. Alternating between allegorical and parodistic interpretations and psychological examinations of the characters, his discussion leaves unresolved the problems of Vonnegut's ironic undercutting of the redemptive figures in his fiction, his parody of their concern for the welfare of humanity, or, as it is stated paradoxically in Cat's Cradle, "the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it." Similarly, to say as Schulz does in talking about Barth, that the narrative refusal to confirm the plot is a reaction to the normative forms which illustrate the novel's 120Reviews dissonance, is to surrender to the complexities of the novel rather than to illuminate them. What is absent most importantly from the exceedingly narrow limits Schulz sets for himself is a view of the fictions he discusses in terms of their comic movement if not of their theoretical correspondence with a formal tradition. Schulz is aware of such technical strategies as the elimination of plot, the parody of literary constructs themselves, or the blending of narrative points of view. What he does not do, however, is show how these elements collaborate to maintain the comic tension. His discussion remains abstract, emerging as a distillation of the essence of the novels, suggested in the plot summaries he appends. Ignoring the grotesque element of black humor, which sees...

Narrative Point of View and the Problem of Erec's Motivation

Narrative Point of View and the Problem of Erec's Motivation

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum

Despite a recent tendency to consider the Merchant's Tale outside the dramatic context of its prologue, and to read it primarily as a broadly humorous, if discordant, piece of anti-feminism, the tale is actually unified by a consistent narrative point of view that successfully accommodates the apparently incongruous themes, tones, and styles of the poem. The final effect, moreover, is not comic at all, but rather sardonic, a dark and unsettling view of an aspect of man's experience. The Merchant's Prologue, though probably written after the tale, is carefully adjusted to the climate of the tale, and must be considered in any critical account, especially since it is through the strong, viable presence of the narrator that the tale is held together. Two features characterize this narrator, one tonal, the other attitudinal. The first is the cool, acidulous voice we hear narrating the story, the expression of an ironic intelligence deeply at odds with the world. The second is the narrator's heightened awareness of sex, particularly in its more grotesque and violent forms, which gives the tale its unsavory atmosphere. These marks of a single unified narrator, together with the ironic finale of the plot, result in a literary mode that is not finally comic, but which suggests comparison with the so-called “problem comedies” of Shakespeare.

<i>Status</i> y funcionalidad del agón bucólico en el <i>Idilio VII</i> de Teócrito

Este trabajo tiene por objeto realizar un análisis del status del agón bucólico y su funcionalidad en el ldilio VII de Teócrito, estableciendo que tipo de confrontación se desarrolla por medio de los cantos, cuál es la relación que existe entre las cancionesentonadas por los personajes -Lícidas y Simíquidas- y el marco en que se ubican desde el punto de vista narrativo -el viaje a la fiesta de las Talisias-, y cómo juega en este caso el principio de analogía inherente al género bucólico.

Intuition and Method in the Teaching of Literature

29 INTUITION AND METHOD IN THE TEACHING OF UTERATURE Charles Olstad Charles Olstad (B.A., St. Olaf; M.A., State University of Iowa; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin), now associate professor of Spanish, has been at the University of Arizona since 1960. He has published articles on Picasso, Baroja, and Sender. This paper was originally read at the 1967 RM-MLA meeting at Albuquerque. My reference in this paper is primarily to the standard introductory survey course of Hterature in a foreign language. Such a course usually follows the second year of college Spanish or the fourth year of high school Spanish. It is generally required of all majors and minors. (My remarks might be applicable to any first course in a foreign literature, and perhaps also to a first hterature course in English. ) The paper deals with the problem of what might be called a "knowledge gap" or perhaps an "intuition gap" between student and teacher. The young student is very likely having his first serious brush with literature, previous English classes notwithstanding. The young teacher, on the other hand, has probably just finished some six years of concentrated literary study and now considers it his profession. It is clear, I think, that we have some kind of real gap here, whatever its exact nature. A pedagogical method in this context has three facets, not entirely separate. (1) A pedagogical method can order and relate the professor's intuitions, acquired over years of study. (2) It can revise, select, and make more immediate the professor's store of notes. (3) It can prime the student , organize his receptive faculties (if any) so that they are more compatible with the purposes of the class. Let me stress at this point that I refer to pedagogical method, not critical method. I am talking about a principle of organizing and conducting the teaching experience in the classroom, not about another New Criticism. I might make some other points before I reach the body of my paper. I am assuming here a literature course, not a translation course, a conversation course, or a civilization/culture course. I am assuming, further, a critical approach which places major attention on the literary work itself, while still leaving time for biographical and historical considerations. And finally, I am assuming a course conducted in the language of the literature. This is not a necessary assumption, but it is the practice I am familiar with. It is also, I think, a practice increasingly common in our undergraduate hterature courses, which makes all the more necessary some 30RM-MLA BulletinMarch 1968 pedagogical method, some instructional pattern discernible to the student even through the foreign language filter. Now what might such a method be? At a rather primitive level it might involve nothing more than a simple checklist such as some of us knew in undergraduate days: plot, character, action, thought, diction, style. Other checklists could involve additional points such as narrative point of view, etc. In any case, the purpose of such a checklist is to remind both student and teacher not to overlook major facets of a writer's art because of inexperience or because of overriding concern for, say, thought alone. And naturally, the success of the learning experience, here as everywhere , depends on the presence of the professor for two main functions: ( 1) he must be constantly guiding and prodding during class discussion, and (2) he must provide a lucid summary or synthesis. Something more than a simple checklist is possible where study is limited to a single hterature, a single genre, or a single period. It is then worthwhile to establish a series of major topics (a refinement of the checklist ) with perhaps subheads under each topic. Then, for each topic the professor can furnish suitable discussion, with examples drawn from the hterature under study. Naturally he will add to his discussion as the course progresses and the students gain experience. Finally, the professor can prepare study-guide questions based on the topics. These questions will form the kernel of the discussion for each lesson and will orient the student toward those matters the professor wants to stress and which he will deal with in...

The Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet

The Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet