ellauri052.html on line 93: It seems that as Bellow re-focused his lens on thought, and a main character’s deliberations over it, the fictional world around that central character darkened and cheapened. As the narrator / protagonist’s internal action grows, around him warmth and depth shrinks, until, by Humboldt’s Gift, it is clear that on a mental level, Citrine is utterly alone.
ellauri067.html on line 307: William develops heretical religious ideas, and he writes "a long tract about it ... called On Preterition." In some Protestant doctrines, Christians are divided into "the elect," those chosen by God, and "the preterite," those not chosen, passed over by God. William champions the preterite, and he argues Judas is the savior of the preterite. The narrator then wonders if William´s ideas were "the fork in the road America never took."
ellauri096.html on line 593: Maldoror is a modular (sic) work primarily divided into six parts, or cantos; these parts are further subdivided into a total of sixty chapters, or verses. Parts one through six consist of fourteen, sixteen, five, eight, seven and ten chapters, respectively. With some exceptions, most chapters consist of a single, lengthy paragraph.[b] The text often employs very long, unconventional and confusing sentences which, together with the dearth of paragraph breaks, may suggest a stream of consciousness, or automatic writing. Over the course of the narrative, there is often a first-person narrator, although some areas of the work instead employ a third-person narrative. The book's central character is Maldoror, a figure of evil who is sometimes directly involved in a chapter's events, or else revealed to be watching at a distance. Depending on the context of narrative voice in a given place, the first-person narrator may be taken to be Maldoror himself, or sometimes not. The confusion between narrator and character may also suggest an unreliable narrator.
ellauri096.html on line 597: Several of the parts begin with opening chapters in which the narrator directly addresses the reader, taunts the reader, or simply recounts the work thus far. For example, an early passage warns the reader not to continue:
ellauri106.html on line 529: Without the sure theoretical footing that orthodox Marxism provided those of Benjamin’s generation, Roth, like many who used to kinda identify themselves with the late-20th century left, has been set adrift amid the wreckage of multinational capital, techno-militarism, and the information and cultural revolutions. In his trilogy, Roth offers a complex and beautifully-rendered document of the final decades of the “American Century,” but it is one that, like its narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, ultimately throws up its hands in despair, surrendering the complexities of life and the possibility of positive change en lieu of aesthetic and ascetic remove.
ellauri107.html on line 195: In the following excerpts from Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, the Hawthorne-like character, poet and narrator Miles Coverdale, and the Melville-like character, passionate monomaniac Hollingsworth suggest Melville's influence on the novel. The first person narrator, a young man who joins a major enterprise with mostly adventure-seeking motives, certainly calls to mind narrator Ishmael in Melville's Moby-Dick. The dark and brawny Hollingsworth, bearing a physical resemblance to Melville, cares for Coverdale and seeks his partnership, moreover, in an intensity that seems to parallel Melville's evident affection for and desire for intimacy with Hawthorne. The sharp, mysterious break in the relationships between the two authors and the fictional pair constitute yet another likeness.
ellauri118.html on line 418: ²Focalisation is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. Genette focuses on the interplay between three forms of focalization and the distinction between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators. Homodiegetic narrators exist in the same (hence the word 'homo') storyworld as the characters exist in, whereas heterodiegetic narrators are not a part of that storyworld. The term 'focalization' refers to how information is restricted in storytelling. Genette distinguishes between internal focalization, external focalization, and zero focalization. Internal focalization means that the narrative focuses on thoughts and emotions while external focalization focuses solely on characters' actions, behavior, the setting etc. Zero focalization is seen when the narrator is omniscient in the sense that it is not restricted. Focalization in literature is similar to point-of-view (POV) in film-making and point of view in literature, but professionals in the field often see these two traditions as being distinctly different. Genette's work was intended to refine the notions of point of view and narrative perspective. It separates the question of “Who sees?” in a narrative from “who speaks?”
ellauri118.html on line 536: Perhaps the most common example of metalepsis in narrative occurs when a narrator intrudes upon another world being narrated. In general, narratorial metalepsis arises most often when an omniscient or external narrator begins to interact directly with the events being narrated, especially if the narrator is separated in space and time from these events. Esim Sterne, Tom Jones.
ellauri182.html on line 74: Mikage Sakurai (“MEE-ka-gee Sah-KOO-rye”), a young woman in Tokyo, is the protagonist and narrator; the story is told from her first-person perspective. Mikage has recently been a student. By this time, she has a job as an assistant at a cooking school. Ruminating on death and loneliness frequently, Mikage says in the beginning, “nobody beats me in my kitchen.”
ellauri197.html on line 291: ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’ by Emily Dickinson contains a narrator’s confused thoughts and experiences. She uses complex transformational generative grammar and imagery to convey it further.
ellauri197.html on line 293: ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’ is a two-stanza work where the narrator takes the reader through a series of confusing verb tenses and language choices to represent the overall lack of clarity she has for the memory that she wishes she “could forget.” The cyclical state of the stanzas’ disorganization, additionally, reflects that the narrator feels trapped in her confused loop from the memory, and the reader could finish ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’ without knowing what the troubling memory is. This is yet another method of revealing the narrator’s confusion over the memory. Just as she does not know how to treat the memory, the reader does not know solid details about the memory. From start to finish then, this is a work that is structured perfectly to share and represent the narrator’s confusion.
ellauri197.html on line 295: The shift in verb tenses is remarkable in this first stanza to address the narrator’s unclear thoughts that are connected to whatever memory she wishes to “forget.” Within the first two lines of ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’, the reader encounters past tense in “was” and the subjunctive imagined prospect of “if I could forget.” This “if” indicates that this is only a wish the narrator has, meaning it is not past, present, or future because it has not happened and will not definitively ever happen. From there, the narrator turns to the present tense by saying, “how sad I am.” There is no clear way that all of these verb tenses senspibly link up, and this grammatic confusion mirrors how uncertain and shaken the narrator is from this memory’s lingering presence.
ellauri197.html on line 301: In fact, the reader might assume the thing is the memory, but the fourth line reveals that this cannot be the case. The “recollect[ion]” is addressed as a reason why the “adversity” is not “easy,” and the two cannot be the same thing. It appears then that this is a general sentiment, that the situation that created the memory would be something to “eas[ily]” push past if she could keep from “recollecting” it, but the lack of subject requires additional time to come to this conclusion, thus – again – mirroring the narrator’s uncertainty.
ellauri197.html on line 303: The reader can infer, whatever this memory is, that it is not a good one because if it were pleasant, the narrator would not be “happy” to “forget” it, and also because the situation linked to it is noted as an “adversity.” Not only is that memory evidently unpleasant, but the scenario has an “advers[e]” effect on her current life.
ellauri197.html on line 305: An interesting thing to note, however, is that the “adversity” is treated in a beautiful way by being addressed as a “Bloom.” The capitalization can be written off with the notion that even a bad memory could be important enough to merit capitalization, but a “Bloom” has a connotation of natural beauty and livelihood. This could simply mean the negativity from the circumstance grows with time, but the choice of such a soft verb gives the feeling that the narrator has warm feelings about whatever happened to cause this bad memory—maybe a relationship she loved but lost or a friend who was dear but forsaken. This would again give a reason for the grammatical chaos of the lack of subject and mismatched verb tenses since, it seems, the narrator does not know how she feels about the memory.
ellauri197.html on line 319: It is also noteworthy that she speaks of “perish[ing] of the cold,” not “in the cold.” This treats “the cold,” or the devastation from the memory, like a disease rather than a weather detail, which furthers the paradox of how the situation remembered is treated. In the first stanza, it “Bloom[s].” Here, it has essentially become a disease. This again mirrors the uncertainty and lack of clarity within the narrator’s thoughts regarding the situation.
ellauri197.html on line 321: Overall in ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’, the lack of clear details about what has happened to affect the narrator so, in addition to the confusion of verb tenses, subjects, and figurative language, creates an unclear work that perfectly depicts how unclear the narrator herself feels about her memory. Does she hate it? Does she want to keep it? Was it good? Was it bad? She does not seem to know, just as the reader cannot know the memory’s most vivid details.
ellauri198.html on line 864: William Butler Yeats published his poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in December of 1890, an important year in his life due to his increased association with occult societies in London, United Kingdom. In ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ William Butler Yeats’ narrator asserts his desire to leave the “pavement gray” of his current locale and dwell on the mysterious island of Innisfree, with only bees, crickets, and linnets for a company (and, alas, mosquitoes).
ellauri206.html on line 75: Diegesis (Greek διήγησις "narration") and mimesis (Greek μίμησις "imitation") have been contrasted since Plato's and Aristotle's times. Mimesis shows rather than tells, by means of action that is enacted. Diegesis is the telling of a story by a narrator. The narrator may speak as a particular character, or may be the invisible narrator, or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from "outside" in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.
ellauri210.html on line 1316: The narrator, randomly named André, ruminates on a number of Surrealist principles, before ultimately commencing (around a third of the way through the novel) on a narrative account, generally linear, of his brief ten-day affair with the titular character Nadja. She is so named “because in Russian it's the beginning of the word hope, and because it's only the beginning,” but her name might also evoke the Spanish "Nadie," which means "No one." The narrator becomes obsessed with this woman with whom he, upon a chance encounter while walking through the street, strikes up conversation immediately. He becomes reliant on daily rendezvous, occasionally culminating in romance (a kiss here and there). His true fascination with Nadja, however, is her vision of the world, which is often provoked through a discussion of the work of a number of Surrealist artists, including himself. While her understanding of existence subverts the rigidly authoritarian quotidian, it is later discovered that she is mad and belongs in a sanitarium. After Nadja reveals too many details of her past life, she in a sense becomes demystified, and the narrator realizes that he cannot continue their relationship.
ellauri210.html on line 1318: In the remaining quarter of the text, André distances himself from her corporeal form and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, so much so that one wonders if her absence offers him greater inspiration than does her presence. It is, after all, the reification and materialization of Nadja as an ordinary person that André ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears. There is something about the closeness once felt between the narrator and Nadja that indicated a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday. There is something essentially “mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering” about her; this reinforces the notion that their propinquity serves only to remind André of Nadja's impenetrability. Her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, an absence that permits Nadja to live freely in André's conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining her paradoxical role as both present and absent. With Nadja's past fixed within his own memory and consciousness, the narrator is awakened to the impenetrability of reality and perceives a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil. Thus, he might better put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself. Nadja Nadja soromnoo.
ellauri214.html on line 547: Tokarczuk composed Flights as a “constellation novel”: a postmodern mosaic of meditations on all things in motion from travel-sized toiletries to the blood pumping through the human heart. National, emotional and temporal boundaries are crossed. Thoughts from a thoughtlessly flying semi-autobiographical narrator to Poland and the popular legend of Philippo Verheyen, the Flemish anatomist rumoured to have eaten his own amputated leg.
ellauri222.html on line 177: But “Ravelstein” is a revenge novel, too. It’s not really about Ravelstein/Bloom. It’s about the narrator, a writer named Chick, who has been treated cruelly by his wife, Vela, a beautiful and brilliant physicist—a wicked caricature of Bellow’s fourth wife, the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. There are also a couple of drive-by take-downs along the way—of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion at Chicago rumored to have been involved in the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, and of the owner of a restaurant on St. Martin, in the Caribbean, where Bellow contracted a case of food poisoning that nearly killed him. He brings them into the story just to skewer them.
ellauri248.html on line 85: Let's go through a few of these points. First, I don't think I've ever read a mystery novel with a less likable main character/narrator. Rob (Adam) Ryan is an asshole, plain and simple. Sure, he's been warped by his childhood and circumstances, but he does just about every annoying thing you could possibly imagine-- he constantly navel-gazes and feels self pity, he sleeps with then immediately plays the stereotypical male "I don't want anything to do with you now" role with his female partner (the person we were told was his best friend, and whom he would never ever sleep with), he acts like an idiot over the 17 year old villain/ temptress/ psychopath/ whatever betraying his partner, and by the end of the book he is worse off than ever. I know that lots of detectives (esp. in hard-boild stories) are unlikable, and have many personal issues, but this guy just took the cake. I wanted to take a baseball bat to his head [hear, hear!]. To make matters worse, French throws in this little gem towards the end of the novel:
ellauri248.html on line 87: "I am intensely aware, by the way, that this story does not show me in a particularly flattering light. I am aware that, within an impressively short time of meeting me, Rosalind had me coming to heel like a well-trained dog: running up and down stairs to bring her coffee, nodding along while she bitched about my partner, imagining like some starstruck teenager that she was a kindred soul. But before you decide to despise me too thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie." As if that excused anything... and NO, she didn't "fool" me, because YOU'RE the narrator and YOU'RE the one telling the story. This paragraph probably ticked me off more than anything else in the book.
ellauri270.html on line 389: Even a dystopian society like this one doesn’t exclude other aspects of human nature like youth, popularity, friendship, and selfishness. Nancy’s behavior resembles that of many popular teen girls—again emphasizing the universal nature of Jackson’s story. We get the sense that Old Man Warner is perpetually displeased with any kind of change to tradition—even though the omniscient narrator tells us that the “tradition” Warner is used to is very different from the original lottery.
ellauri270.html on line 411: “The Lottery” begins with a description of a particular day, the 27th of June, which is marked by beautiful details and a warm tone that strongly contrast with the violent and dark ending of the story. The narrator describes flowers blossoming and children playing, but the details also include foreshadowing of the story’s resolution, as the children are collecting stones and three boys guard their pile against the “raids of the other boys.” These details… read analysis of The Juxtaposition of Peace and Violence.
ellauri272.html on line 416: M.L. Rosenthal felt that although Ammons shares Wallace Stevens’s desire to intellectualize rather than simply describe, he falls short of Stevens’s success. Paul Zweig agrees that “unlike T.S. Eliot or Stevens, Ammons does not write well about ideas.” When the narrator finds the dead mole under the leaves, he says, “mercy: I’d just had / lunch: squooshy ice cream: I nearly / unhad it.” Vendler commented, “There has been nothing like this in American poetry before Ammons—nothing with this liquidity of folk voice.”
ellauri369.html on line 364: The Editor: The narrator of the novel, who in reviewing Teufelsdröckh´s book, reveals much about his own tastes, as well as deep sympathy towards Teufelsdröckh, and much worry as to social issues of his day. His tone varies between conversational, condemning and even semi-Biblical prophecy. The Reviewer should not be confused with Carlyle himself, seeing as much of Teufelsdröckh´s life implements Carlyle´s own biography. I told you so!
ellauri389.html on line 297: Just as the Christian God determines what is right and wrong for many if not all monkeys around the world, Nature serves this purpose for the narrator. He is, in this tender moment, directing his monologue not to her but to his sister, Dorothy. They are extraordinarily close and he wishes to share with her his adoration for Nature. He is searching for a way to make his sister understand that placing your heart within the hands of Nature is without risk. She should feel the “mountain-winds” on her skin and not resist them.
xxx/ellauri086.html on line 612: The unnamed narrator is with the famous Parisian amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin when they are joined by G-, prefect of the Paris police. The prefect has a case he would like to discuss with Dupin.
xxx/ellauri086.html on line 625: Alone together, the narrator asks Dupin how he found the letter. Dupin explains the Paris police are competent within their limitations, but have underestimated with whom they are dealing. The prefect mistakes the Minister D— for a fool because he is a poet. (Siis kumpi on? Perfekti vai ministeri Dee? No Poe on ainakin, senhän sanoo nimikin, Poe-t. Ja hölmökin se on.) For example, Dupin explains how an eight-year-old boy made a small fortune from his friends at a game called Odds and Evens. The boy had determined the intelligence of his opponents and played upon that to interpret their next move. Tästä aiheesta on valtava amer. kirjallisuus, koskien vangin dilemman toistoja. He explains that D— knew the police detectives would have assumed that the blackmailer would have concealed the letter in an elaborate hiding place, and thus hid it in plain sight.
xxx/ellauri086.html on line 925: In the essay, Poe traces the logical progression of his creation of "The Raven" as an attempt to compose "a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste." He claims that he considered every aspect of the poem. For example, he purposely set the poem on a tempestuous evening, causing the raven to seek shelter. He purposefully chose a pallid bust to contrast with the dark plume of the bird. The bust was of Pallas in order to evoke the notion of scholar, to match with the presumed student narrator poring over his "volume[s] of forgotten lore." No aspect of the poem was an accident, he claims, but is based on total control by the author.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 252: In fact, I’m reminded of a letter I received in relation to my seventh novel from an Armenian-American who objected – why did I have to make the narrator of We Need to Talk About Kevin Armenian? He didn’t like my narrator, and felt that her ethnicity disparaged his community. I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage, because my best friend in the States was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something! Joe Biden has finally admitted that the Armenian genocide was a genocide and not just an unusually bad case of flu. I am not convinced of it yet.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 276: I worry that the clamorous world of identity politics is also undermining the very causes its activists claim to back. As a fiction writer, yeah, I do sometimes make my narrator an Armenian. But that’s only by way of a start. Merely being Armenian is not to have a character as I understand the word. I need to add a whole host of racial prejudices to fatten him out. Luckily I didn't need to do that with my bro.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 774: In the subsequent passage, "of Shem... may Canaan be his servant,"[9:26] the narrator is foreshadowing Israel's conquest of the promised land. Biblical scholar Philip R. Davies explains that the author of this narrative used Noah to curse Canaan, in order to provide justification for the later Israelites driving out and enslaving the Canaanites.
xxx/ellauri116.html on line 278: Chapters 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, and 14 contain a color print of a famous painting accompanied by a narration, each from a separate voice. Vizi takuulla mä kynäilin jotain sarkastista tostakin. Rigoberto, Lucrecia, Alfonso, and perhaps even Justiniana, all become the protagonist/narrator of one of the paintings by Jordaenes, Boucher, Titian, Francis Bacon, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Fra Angelico. This rather heterogenous collection of prints share the fact that they could be viewed as depicting various aspects of sensuality, from the voyeuristic to the immaculate.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 758: Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a French middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with an American 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he sexually molests (fucks) after he becomes her stepfather. "Lolita" is his private nickname for Dolores.
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 310: The consequence? A narrator trapped not by bloodthirsty Klansmen but by a desperate baby-mama gunning for alimony.
xxx/ellauri137.html on line 771: The narrator was crazy annoying, and almost every other character seemed just as bad. Gave up partway through chapter 4 (11%).
xxx/ellauri154.html on line 103: Fyodor Dostoevsky "read widely in the numerous novels of George Sand" and translated her La dernière Aldini in 1844, but "discovered to his dismay that the work had already appeared in Russian". In his mature period, he expressed an ambiguous attitude towards her. For instance, in his novella Notes from Underground the narrator refers to the sentiments he expresses as, "I laugh off at that point the European, inexplicably lofty subtleties of George Sand".
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 151: Kake, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises is an expatriate working as a journalist in Paris. He served in World War I, in which he suffered an injury that made him impotent. This somewhat hinders his otherwise very close relationship with Brett Ashley. He typifies the Lost Generation, always seeking escape and finding no meaning in life having lost his dick in the horrors and intensity of the war.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 588: It was originally first person with Papa (hemingway) as the narrator but I changed to third to fit the stories I'm referencing.
xxx/ellauri200.html on line 182: Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.
xxx/ellauri224.html on line 341: What was this book even about??? The "narrator" kept jumping around with what he was talking about, quite a few times I had no idea who was speaking, and what was the point of all the billionaires? They had absolutely nothing to do with the story! It took 104 pages of confusing and pointless narrative for the guy to tell the girl (after 40 years of knowing her, no less) that he wanted to be with her. This might have been one of the most anti-climactic love stories I have ever read. The secondary characters seemed completely irrelevant to the plotline and it appeared that their only function was to take up printable space. The story was unimaginative, lacking in depth, and devoid of anything memorable. The only reason I bothered to finish it was to get one step closer to finishing my goodreads reading challenge, else I would have ditched it at page 20.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 277: Several of Le Guin´s works have featured stylistic or structural features that were unusual or even subversive. The heterogeneous structure of The Left Hand of Darkness, described as "distinctly post-modern" (eek!), was unusual for the time of its publication. This was in marked contrast to the structure of (primarily male-authored) traditional science fiction, which was straightforward and linear. The novel was framed as part of a report sent to the Ekumen by the protagonist Genly Ai after his time on the planet Gethen, thus suggesting that Ai was selecting and ordering the material, consisting of personal narration, diary extracts, Gethenian myths, and ethnological reports. Earthsea also employed an outlandishly unconventional narrative form described by scholar Mike Cadden (Princeton U Senior Lecturer in Theater) as "free indirect discourse", in which the feelings of the protagonist are not directly separated from the narration, making the narrator seem sympathetic to the characters, and removing the skepticism towards a character´s thoughts and emotions that are a feature of more direct narration. Cadden suggests that this method leads to younger readers sympathizing directly with the characters, making it an effective technique for young-adult literature like Flaubert or Zola.
xxx/ellauri228.html on line 47: Nimettömäxi jäävän kääntäjän loppuhuomautusten perusteella Stan ei ollut hullumpi kaveri. "Much to the discomfort of his critics, and to the disappointment of many of his fans, who have pleaded, "Write us more things like Solaris", Lem is not content to repeat his previous successes: he continues to follow his own difficult drummer. The Star Diaries offers only one example of this stubborn and ever restless individuality. The name "Tichy" suggests in Polish the word 'quiet', which some may find in keeping with the narrator's character.
xxx/ellauri229.html on line 517: Tyler Durden, left, plays the imaginary friend-slash-alter ego of the unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton in "Fight Club."
xxx/ellauri379.html on line 117: But it’s overly reductive to boil Heart of Darkness down to the commonalities it shares with Conrad’s own experiences. It would be useful to examine its elements crucial to the emergence of modernism: for example, Conrad’s use of multiple narrators; his couching of one narrative within another; the story’s achronological unfolding; and as would become increasingly clear as the 20th century progressed, his almost post-structuralist distrust in the stability of language. At the same time, his story pays homage to the Victorian tales he grew up on, evident in the popular heroism so central to his story’s narrative. In that sense, Heart of Darkness straddles the boundary between a waning Victorian sensibility and a waxing Modernist one.
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