ENGL 25640 The Problem of Fictional Character

University of Chicago

Author: jsourdillon

Voice(s) in The Sympathizer

February 21, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Voice(s) in The Sympathizer

 

 

The first person narrative in the Sympathizer makes the narrator’s voice our main point of entry into the story, and the various characters involved. The way the narration handles free direct speech points to his voice as the filter through which we have access to his world, as he constantly blurs the line between narration, indirect and direct speech. From the beginning of the novel, and on multiple occasions, the narrator addresses the Commandant directly, making him the preferred interlocutor to his narration – it might serve as a way to recall some past events, and have another characters rhetorically check the truth in the narrator’s words, but it is also a way for him to play with the proximity/distance structure of every one of his relationships: on page 32, he is trying to either breach the distance or increase it through irony by having the Commandant agree to his rather treacherous thoughts (“It is always better to admire the best among our foes than the worst among our friends. Wouldn’t you agree, Commandant?”). The unconventional handling of free speech serves a similar purpose, where the task of the reader figuring out whose voice he is reading is made slightly more difficult by the absence of any typographic marker of free speech. This is in my opinion a way for the narrator to show that he can “see any issue from both sides” (1), and the blending of voices is made by his understanding the various persona the other characters take on, as he identify with their plight: “Like him, I, too, was a man trapped by difficult circumstances”.  One instance where we do see direct speech markers is on page 76,where the narrator professes his love to Sofia – a moment where there must not be any sort of identification, where romantic entanglement on the narrator’s part must reject the blending of their voices.

The Bluest Eyes and narrative shifts

February 14, 2018 / / 1 Comment

The Bluest Eyes and narrative shifts

 

 

The Bluest Eyes keeps shifting the point of view of the narration, through various mechanisms, either through a different narrator or a change in the focalization. If the first part kept mostly to Claudia and an omniscient narrator’s perspective, the second part of the novel is less sparse in using these kinds of devices, as we are made aware of both of Pecola’s parents’ stories – Polly through a first-person narrative like a journal, intertwined with the omniscient narrator’s account, and Cholly through his own internal focalization. We are even invited into Pecola’s mind, in a strange dialogue with an unnamed “friend” (who might be understood as a form of Pecola’s subconscious). In a novel that questions the subjective view of beauty, showing multiple accounts and perspective serves to create and question a previously fixed understanding of what beauty can contain. There is no clear and definite perspective on beauty, and it translates in the form of a wavering identity; there is a clear vocabulary of stripping oneself of everything once the self is viewed through the lens of beauty: Polly experiences it both when she take on the standard of beauty for herself – “in equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap” (122) – and when she gives it up – “Everything went. Look like I just didn’t care no more after that.” The clear dichotomy between “after” and “before” (196) getting blue eyes – or, the equivalent of becoming beautiful – is soon blurred by the unnamed voice who plants seeds of doubts in Pecola’s mind, forcing her to continue her quest – until the last image of her, “searching the garbage” (206).

Solipsistic tendencies in Fun Home

February 7, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Trying to relate to other people is a constant in Fun Home, but Alison chooses to do it through the form of the autobiography: on page 139-140, she establishes a line, from her family as a “mildly autistic colony”, her father’s life as a “solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide” and her own “compulsive propensity to autobiography”. Characters in Fun Home seem to try to hold themselves up, living not in relations to each other but building their character-system by the force of their own narration. Alison’s epistemological crisis, where nouns and declarative sentences suddenly cannot take a fixed and delimited meaning in her autobiographical experience, could result from the failure of Alison trying to define herself without this relation to others: adopting a subjective, solipsistic perspective has made her unsure of what links words and meaning, signifier and signified. This crisis starts to find a resolution –materially, in the diary, and epistemologically – once her mother’s handwriting takes over (149), when two consciousness meet. It is also resolved in experience, the setting sun creating a silent understanding between her and her father.

Oedipa and ambiguous focalization

January 31, 2018 / / 1 Comment

In the airport scene, Oedipa is described as “playing the voyeur and listener” (100), observing an array of strange and unusual characters walking by her. Describing the people she sees, the narrative, somehow takes on an omniscient point of view through her eyes, as for example she knows a Negro woman “kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason”. Contradicting these strange omniscient descriptions, is Oedipa’s own doubts as to how many times she saw the post horn, as “perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it”. Oedipa’s focalization wavers often between internal, subjective, and something more omniscient, never quite reconciling its ambiguity (as when, on page 28, she manages to take off three different earrings). Perhaps the answer can be found in this same description on page 100, where Oedipa sees a double of herself, another voyeur whose consciousness, for some reason, she can’t access, as she doesn’t know what he or she is looking for (“searching for who knows what specific image”).

The Invisible Man and public speaking

January 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

The Invisible Man and public speaking

  • Up to chapter seventeen

 

Public speaking holds an important place in the narrative development of the invisible man – “silence is consent” the narrator explains later (345). The narrator cannot speak in the first chapter, but in chapters thirteen and sixteen, he becomes someone who is listened to. One of the early issues with public speech concerns the meaning of the words spoken in public spaces, as they seem to be more for the show and hold no deeper meaning: they are said to be “like words hurled to the trees of a wilderness, or into a well of slate-gray water; more sound than sense, a play upon the resonances of buildings, an assault upon the temples of the ear” or “the sound of words that were no words, counterfeit notes singing achievements yet unachieved” (113). For his political speech, the words have taken on a magical nature, as there is “a magic in spoken words” (381). Like Douglass who he thinks has “talked his way from slavery to a government ministry”, the narrator refuses to stop speaking, surmises that he is changing both himself and his station as he keeps on speaking: “something strange and miraculous and transforming is taking place in me right now” (345). The rhythm and sounds of words seem to be much more important that their meaning, though, and one can wonder if this belief will hold: the invisible man of the prologue seem to have foregone any sort of public speaking, and yet the narrative he is telling in the form of the book seems to be an example of it.

Transparency and deceit

January 10, 2018 / / 0 Comments

In chapters 4 to 5 of Invisible Man, the invisible man’s colleagues are described as “frozen in solemn masks”, singing “mechanically” (p.111) the songs white men love to hear black people sing. As the college is shrouded in deceits and lies – and its prime member Dr. Bledsoe most of all, the invisible man’s relationship to others is redefined through the lens of a dichotomy between transparency and deceit. As he becomes the only character to be completely transparent (to the point that Bledsoe does not even believe him, see “Don’t lie to me!” p. 139) he is made aware of the differences with those around him. His interior life may stay transparent to the reader, through the mechanics of the first person narration, but by the end of chapter nine, the subconscious nature of his previous dreams, starring his grandfather chasing and belittling him, take on a more conscious meaning as he starts “dreaming of revenge” (p.195).

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