Lecture_PPT.pdf
- 1. TWO SELVES Crafting Effective First-Person Retrospective Narrators
- 2. A PREVIEW v Definitions of terms & ideas v Methods for creating duality in four coming-of-age novels: v Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield v Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird v Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster v Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending
- 3. First-person Retrospective Narrator ■ A first-person narrator who tells a story about his or her own past experiences. ■ The first-person retrospective narrator is “split into two different manifestations of the same self, one who narrates and one who experiences” (Nicol 195).
- 4. NARRATORIAL DUALITY ■ The psychological and temporal separation between a narrator’s present (narrating) self and his past (experiencing) self. ■ First-person retrospective narrators “may recount their childhood experiences from a number of different vantage points” and “may ‘enter into’ his or her lived experience as a child to a greater or lesser degree, from a ‘reliving’...to a conventional narrative distance” (Galbraith 123).
- 5. Narratorial duality continued ■ There can be “an interplay between these two perspectives, which can be juxtaposed, superimposed, or contrasted to varying effects” (Morini 601).
- 6. DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY ■ DEIXIS – Greek: to point, to show, to refer – Linguistics: words that indicate who, where, and when. – Narratology: any reference to the two planes of existence in a retrospective narrative (the here-and-now and the there-and-then).
- 7. DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY CONTINUED ■ How a narrator indicates that she has shifted or will shift between the plane of the here-and-now (present) and that of the there-and-then (past/memory).
- 8. EVEN MORE DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY ■ PUSH: A shift from the here-and-now to the there-and-then ■ POP: A shift in the opposite direction ■ BLENDING: Presence of both deictic planes at once
- 9. BILDUNGSROMAN ■ A first-person retrospective novel that narrates the coming- of-age process. ■ This genre “narrates the process of becoming” (Karafilis 64). ■ Plural: Bildungsromane
- 11. How Charles Dickens Crafts Duality § Deictic POPs § Deictic PUSHes § Narratorial self-reference
- 12. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born...” (Dickens 13).
- 13. “I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy” (Dickens 24).
- 14. David “makes a determined effort to re-enter faithfully his earlier self as child and to relive his early life” (Galbraith 123). — “Here is a long passage—what an enormous perspective I make of it!—leading from Peggoty’s kitchen to the front-door. A dark store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at night; for I don’t know what may be among those tubs and jars and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly- burning light, letting a mouldy air come out at the door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee all at one whiff” (Dickens 25).
- 15. “My school-days! The silent gliding of my life—from childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran. “A moment, and I occupy my place in the Cathedral, where we all went together, every Sunday morning” (Dickens 274).
- 16. “And now my written story ends. I look back, once more—for the last time—before I close these leaves. “I see myself, with Agnes by my side, journeying along the road of life” (Dickens 878).
- 17. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD HARPER LEE.
- 18. How harper Lee Crafts Duality § Deictic blending § Where there is no clear POP or PUSH, but Scout’s narrating and experiencing selves often seem to exist simultaneously, which allows Lee to build and manipulate the sense of Scout’s duality.
- 19. How Lee indicates (when they aren’t blended) the two manifestations of Scout: § Narrator-Scout: heightened diction, narratorial judgement and interpretation, and a dry, knowing sense of humor. § Character-Scout: simpler diction, lack of judgement/interpretation, “relives” experiences.
- 20. “When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that” (Lee 3).
- 21. “He had asked me earlier in the summer to marry him, then he promptly forgot about it. He staked me out, marked as his property, said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up twice but it did no good” (Lee 46).
- 22. “I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers” (Lee 19).
- 24. How Kaye Gibbons Crafts Duality § Structural duality § Deictic POPs § Deictic PUSHes § Narrative immediacy
- 25. Narrative Immediacy ■ Occurs in “situations in which little gap exists (or is communicated to the reader) between the protagonist and the narrator” (Sandefur 1). ■ By using narrative immediacy in a coming-of-age novel, writers can “present the protagonist’s interpretations as they occur and change,” which helps to “re-create...the process of identity development” (Sandefur 7).
- 26. (page 1)
- 27. (page 2)
- 28. (page 3)
- 29. (page 4)
- 30. “Dora asks her mama if she plans to put some old tacky paper frame on their wall and her mama says she should be nice to me because this is all so cute. “But it is not cute and it is not a game I want to say. I wanted to scoop the cats and the colored frames up and burn them and forget I had tried to appeal to somebody and look at them now making fun of me. “But I left it all there on the floor and walked away” (Gibbons 109).
- 31. THE SENSE OF AN ENDING JULIAN BARNES.
- 32. How Julian Barnes Crafts Duality § References to narrative act and act of remembering § Frequent narratorial judgement/interpretation § Deictic POPs § Structural duality
- 33. “I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any kind of nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage” (Barnes 3). “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time” (Barnes 45).
- 34. “...we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos” (Barnes 10).
- 35. “You can probably guess that I’m putting off telling you the next bit” (Barnes 44). “Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange” (Barnes 20).
- 36. “...when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. ...What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been” (Barnes 65).
- 37. THE END.