Полховська О. В. , мазіна О. М. , князева Н. А.

ПОЛХОВСЬКА О.В., МАЗІНА О.М., КНЯЗЕВА Н.А.

 

THE GUIDE TO LITERARY ANALYSIS

 

НАВЧАЛЬНИЙ ПОСІБНИК З КОМПЛЕКСНОГО АНАЛІЗУ ХУДОЖНЬОГО ТЕКСТУ

для студентів денної та заочної форм навчання

спеціальності 6.020303 «Англійська мова та література»

освітньо-кваліфікаційного рівня «бакалавр»

 

Сімферополь 2013

 

Рекомендовано Міністерством освіти і науки молоді та спорту України як навчальний посібник для студентів філологічних спеціальностей вищих навчальних закладів (наказ № 1/11-5579 від 18.03.13)

Укладачі:

зав. кафедри англійської філології ТНУ, к.ф.н., доц. Полховська О.В.,

к.ф.н., доц. Мазіна О.М.,

к.ф.н., доц. Князева Н.А.

Рецензенти:

Доктор філологічних наук, професор, декан факультету перекладознавства Херсонського державного університету Демецька Владислава Валентинівна

Доктор філологічних наук, доцент кафедри методики викладання філологічних дисциплін Таврійського національного університету ім. В.І. Вернадського Орєхов Володимир Вікторович

Доктор філологічних наук, доцент кафедри філології Кримського республіканського інституту післядипломної освіти Резник Оксана Володимірівна

Кандидат філологічних наук, доцент кафедри англійської філології Дніпропетровського національного університету ім. Олеся Гончара

Олена Олексіївна Конопелькіна

 

 

CONTENTS

Introduction…………………………………………8

I. Theoretical fundamentals of literary text analysis……………………………………………..13

1.1. Notion of style. Artistic systems. Genre…...13

1.2. Social and cultural background …………..34

1.3. Thematic formation. Gist and problem identification…………………………………….....44

1.4. Author’s tone and intent..…..……………...57

1.5. Composition and content organization. Types of narration………………………………………..68

1.6. Point of view. Voice and focalization…..….96

1.7. Setting and environment….………………115

1.8. Characterisation…………………………..123

1.9. Language and imagery. Individual style of writing…………………………………………….145

1.10. Stylistic devices……………………………171

II. Strategies for conducting literary text analysis and writing an essay……………………253

III. Standards for essay evaluation..………….256

IV. Theoretical approaches to literary texts…258

References……..………………………………….280

Appendix 1. Helpful linking words and devices..285

Appendix 2. Helpful key words………………....290

 

INTRODUCTION

 

· The aim of TheGuide to Literary Analysis is to bring together existing models and approaches from literary studies, to provide methods, tools and procedures for active exploring literary works through reading, response and analysis, which will bring out students’ interpretation and account for the ways in which the work produces the meanings found in it. The ultimate end of a literary analysis is, first and foremost, a deeper understanding and a fuller appreciation of how a literary work communicates a particular set of meanings for a reader, how the resources of literature are used to create the meaningfulness of the text.

· Text analysis is an active enterprise that requires imagination, effort, and engagement with a text; it is a kind of interpretation enlarging and deepening readers’ experience – as they interact with a text – in order to come to some conclusion and to gain an earned opinion. It is ongoing and recursive process of accumulating opinions, constant revising and modifying them.

· Any text has always been realized asbelonging to cross-cultural communication where meaning is not made with language alone but accomplished by some kinds of social and cultural presuppositions. To make sense of the text, a reader is to be interested in the actual processes of decoding and interpretation. Reasonable interpretation of the text shows the understanding of its social context, and how social conventions have helped determine its meaning. In effect, a work of literature is not seen as eternal and timeless but is situated historically, socially, intellectually, written at a particular time, with some intent, with particular cultural, personal, gender, racial, class and other perspectives.

· In a literary work the message is delivered through a text (context), subtext (implication, hidden associations) and super-text (connection between the literary text and reality). With the purpose to uncover it, one needs to work out through various strategies that let us know what kind of text it is – its genre, grammar and syntax, rhetoric (way of persuading and building up an argument), narration, images, subject matter, all the ways in which the meaning is constructed.

· Doing the analysis one needs to be clear about the model to use, because that has serious implications for how one understands the presented information and what the interpretations are. This means that before plunging straightaway into analysis there should be considered the assumptions about the text and the relations it has with the wide context and the reader to make sure they are at work.

· As far as the students of English Philology Department are concerned, there is an essential side of their analytical reading activity: they are to bother themselves with an important question of acceptability of certain content in the view of modernphilologist. The students are to activate the covered content on critical thinking basis. It is essential that the students should be able to respond appropriately to the text rather than merely retell it, to identify themselves with some ideas by expressing opinions, giving reasons, speculating, hypothesizing. To put it differently, aesthetic and intellectual responses to the work of fiction need to go beyond pure description or retelling, the responses should contain a speculative problem-solving, analytical element. Being a philologist in a wide sense of a word implies academic ability to comprehend literary texts of different artistic systems, genres and narrative forms, to identify its place within the world literary process. Future philologists are to be prepared to reconstruct the context of the work of fiction; to identify its genre, leading conflicts, themes; to appreciate its aesthetic properties.

· The Guide to Literary Analysis is aimed at forming particular skills: to provide complex textual and stylistic analysis of a work of fiction, to learn how to elicit implications of the text, to take up critical stance, to relate the reading to one’s personal values and attitudes, to develop debate based on different interpretations of a single text, to produce the response appropriately – work out arguments for/against, assertively state one’s point of view, build up reasoning, criticise, summarise, exemplify, make comparisons, to establish a set of criteria for a literary text evaluation.

I. THEORETICAL FUNDAMENTALS OF LITERARY TEXT ANALYSIS

 

Questions

To what literary artistic system/trend does this piece of writing belong? What features of this piece of writing are typical of this artistic system/trend? To what genre can you refer this extract/story?

Language in use for analysis

the sharp-edged suspense of a detective story

the best-known scientific popularizer of our time

The passage now commented upon is a specimen of…

The information is rendered in terms of…

The genre chosen by the writer dictates the adoption of the certain style.

Several characteristic features pertaining to belles-letters style texts are observed in…

It belongs to the sub-style work as …

The novel is a rich blend of historical fact and derived fiction / a modern parable that invites readers to probe below its deceptively simple surface for deeper truths.

 

 

Questions

Comment on the range of social and cultural items in the text. What do you know about the author, his/her occupation, personal background and political/religious leanings? To whom do you think the author is writing? For what purpose was the text written? What prompted its creation? What do you know about the text publication? What is your historical and cultural distance from the text under consideration? When was the text written? What were the main events of the time? How did the contemporary thought influence the text? What social conditions (values, morals, economic pressures, power relationships, gender role, and so on) could conceivably create the drama of the text? What can you say about the difference between your culture's (and sub-culture's) views of the world, your own experiences, on the one hand, and those of the text, on the other? What is it that you might have to understand better in order to experience the text of particular time, class, gender and race? Is it possible that your reading might be different because of your particular social (race, gender, class, etc.) and historical context? How does your world govern the way you see the world of the text? In which way does the text interact with other texts/media?

Questions

What is the theme of the extract? Does the story address any universal problem or experience, or does it teach a lesson? Does it reflect any particular set of religious or political beliefs? Start with the basic situation, and move to consider any key statements, any obvious or less obvious conflicts, tensions, ambiguities, key relationships.What is the main idea of the extract? To what problems does the story address? Are these problems just posed or solved? How are the arguments organized? What moral issues is the author concerned about? Which episodes make the main idea the most perceptible? Give a short summary of the text.

AUTHOR’S TONE AND INTENT

 

There is a complex interaction between the author’s intention and the reader’s ability to decode it. While reading engages readers and holds their attention with well-made form and significant content, they are encouraged to accept the persuasive intent of the text – the author’s desire to get them to change our minds, accept a new idea, or perform an act. Being persuaded is a subtle process, intensely personal and often unpredictable, often accounted for experiences and feelings similar to those of central characters, or an argument one is open-minded about, finally because one wants his/her feelings and opinions reinforced.

Aesthetic responses are difficult to describe because they involve memories and sensations, personal and emotional reasons. They reveal the extent to which readers have taken part in making meaning of the literary work they encounter by opening themselves to it.

Sometimes the narrator’s opinion is made clear in a direct address to the reader; sometimes it emerges through the tone of the narrative, its attitude to the given subject (tone can be viewed as an expression of attitude). The use of the term “tone” in reference to texts was introduced by I.A. Richards. Tone is the attitude or feeling displayed by the author towards the readers and what occurs in the text. It suffices to look at the sentence structure (syntax) and word choice (diction) in order to figure out whether the passage is neutral (objective, explanatory, detached) or opinionated and emotional (subjective). A writer can adopt various tones – playful, serious, ironic, solemn, etc. If the text is clearly subjective, it is possible to decide if the author is positive (approving, sympathetic) about the subject matter or negative (disapproving) about it.

To see the difference between neutral and emotional writing compare the following extracts. The first, Mao. Unknown story (2005) by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, is a political biography of modern times where the authors shed the myths on which Mao’s national and international reputation rested. The authors objectively portray tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity: “From autumn 1953 nationwide requisitioning was imposed, in order to extract more food to pay for the Superpower Programme. The system followed that of a labour camp: leave the population just enough to keep them alive, and take all the rest. The regime decided that what constituted subsistence was an amount of food equivalent to 200 kg of processed grain per year, and this was called “basic food”. The second, The Insurrection in Dublin by Irish writer James Stephens, is a superb eyewitness account of the Easter rising of 1916. One afternoon Stephens watched in horror as rebel troops, in a botched attempt at casting off British rule, threw up a barricade that ultimately led to a civilian being shot right before him: “This has taken everyone by surprise. It is possible, that, with exception of their staff, it has taken the volunteers themselves by surprise; but today our peaceful city is no longer peaceful; guns are sounding, or rolling and crackling from different directions, and, although rarely, the rattle of machine gun can be heard also. (…) After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no longer the radiant and serene goddess we knew or hoped for – it is a disease, it is a moral syphilis and will ravage until the body in which it can dwell has been purged. Mr. Redmond told the lie and he is answerable to England for the violence she had to be guilty of, and to Ireland for the desolation to which we have had to submit. Without his lie there had been no Insurrection; without it there had been at this moment, and for a year past, an end to the “Irish question”. Ireland must in ages gone have been guilty of abominable crimes or she could not at this juncture have been afflicted with John Redmond”.

The author’s tone tends to be biased in many ways; it suggests his/her predisposition to influence the reader through emotional appeal and/or slanted presentation material. Bias may also be revealed through highly emotional statements, name-calling, stereotyping or over-generalization, faulty assumption based on weak or inaccurate information, and contradiction. American feminist author M. French claims: “Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.” (The Women’s Room (1977)).

While tone is the deliberate stance the writer takes toward the subject of his or her writing, mood is the overall climate of feeling or emotional setting a writer creates as a backdrop for the action. For instance, Mary Shelly creates a powerful mood of gloom, horror, and suspense in the following excerpt from her novel Frankenstein (1818) choosing words with connotations that evoke these gloomy, anxious feelings in her audience: “It was a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and convulsive motion agitated its limbs”.

The writer’s diction affects both tone and mood. Word choice, details, images, figurative language, and repetition all contribute to the mood of the piece of writing; these elements invite the reader to participate in the moment, to become part of the scene, and to have the same feeling.

Sometimes we can speak about pathos of literary works (strong emotional and evaluative attitude to the subject matter of writing). We distinguish heroic, dramatic, tragic, satirical, comic, sentimental, romantic pathos. We should also distinguish pathos of character’s speech and author’s pathos:

• pathos of character’s speech. The climax of The Scarlet Letter (1850) by N. Hawthorne is Hester Prynne’s and Arthur’s Dimmesdale’s date in the forest where Hester pleads her lover to flee to Europe: “Begin all anew! <…> The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one <…> Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die!”
• author’s pathos. The author’s pathos can be observed in the same book by N. Hawthorne when Dimmesdale is spoken about: “Yes; their minister whom they so loved – and who so loved them all; that he could not depart heavenward without a sigh – had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would soon leave them in their tears! <…> Never, from the soil of New England, had gone up such shout! Never, on New England soil, had stood the man honored by his mortal brethren as the preacher!”

Questions

What’s the author’s tone? In what vein is the story told? Is it calm and tranquil or is it charged with tension and emotions? Is the extract neutral or opinionated and emotional, even pathetic? Is the author positive (approving, sympathetic) about the subject matter or negative (disapproving)? What’s the author’s intent? Is his/her view biased? What is the mood of the extract? What aspects of the human condition are foregrounded, what are suppressed? What note does the initial part of the story strike? On what note does the story end? How does the word choice and syntax contribute to the mood? What images impart the story a cheerful / melancholy / angry / humorous / sarcastic tone?

Q. But wasn’t he dead?

Q. What did you think?

A. Oh, it was not of my business! It wasn’t any of my funeral.

IV. Argumentation can be in the form of expository writing (or reasoning) and lyrical digressions. In XVIII-XIX century prose authors could appear as a commentators and moralists, philosophers and publicists. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Dickens speculates how the noble goals of freedom fighters became the crazed bloodbath called the Reign of Terror: “Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”

The events in the narrative are arranged with respect to time. That arrangement involves the notions of order, duration, and frequency. Order refers to the relationship between the chronology of the story (the order in which the events of the story occur in the fictional world) and the chronology of the narrative (the order in which the narrative presents those events). The events and things described in the text can be presented:

· In chronological order: in many types of writing – short stories, biographies, and historical accounts, for example – it is the most effective way of presenting a series of events. Notice how the following paragraph from a science fiction story uses chronological order to dramatize the hardship of the characters’ journey.

“The summer was waning when Shann took his two sons and went ahead to explore the way. For three days they climbed, and for three nights slept as best they could on freezing rocks, and on the fourth morning there was nothing ahead but a gentle rise to a cairn of gray stones built by other travelers, centuries ago.”

Arthur C. Clarke, History Lesson (1949)

A story may begin with a set-piece description of a landscape or townscape that is to be the primary setting of the story (for example, the sombre description of Egdon Heath at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878)). It may begin with a self-introduction by the narrator (“Call me Ishmael” in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)). A writer may begin with a philosophical reflection. Many novels begin with a “frame-story” (Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) consists of a deceased woman’s memoir which is read aloud to guests at a country-house party who have been entertaining themselves with ghost stories). Traditional beginnings of fairy-tales are ab ovo.

· In non-chronological order: the story can be anachronic with a combination of diverse stories. Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just one thing after another, it allows the reader to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events.The writermay start the story in medias res: for example,begin a mystery story with a murder and then circle back to the events that led up to the murder (famous Agatha Christie’s detective novels and stories). The narrative of the Odyssey begins halfway through the hero’s hazardous voyage home from the Trojan War, loops back to describe his earlier adventures, then follows the story to its conclusion in Ithaca. At the beginning of J. Kellerman’s detective novel Billy Straight (2000) the main character, a twelve-year-old Billy becomes a witness of a violent murder – a man viciously butchers a woman. As he runs for his life, his potential savior Petra Connor, a homicide detective, untangles the knots of the committed crime.

· A flashback (analepsis or retrospect) takes the reader to the event that happened prior to the present and clarifying it. Flashbacks help readers get a sense of what happened earlier that led to the present situation and what motivates characters. It changes the interpretation of something which happened much later in the chronology of the story:

“My feelings about Garfield are further bedeviled by what Garfield has become. He has shrunk – almost literally – from the strong, commanding figure he once was to the slighter, more tentative person that old age and illness have rendered him (…) He has a variety of cancer – I’m not sure which – and has only about two years to live. Just after a strange request, stranger perhaps because he made it of me. He asked me to take a photograph from my father’s bedroom window, looking down towards the river. He wanted a photo that would show the path by the side of the field, the trees, the big pool and the fields and farms beyond. I agreed of course, but never got round to it. So here is the beginning of a feeling of guilt which is mixed in with all the other feelings making the whole lot more confused than before.”

D.S. Mackenzie, The Language of Water (1991)

A flash-forward (prolepsis) interrupts the present chronology of the story and connects it to the future. Foreshadowing occurswhenthe writer hints about something that may happen in the future, it can help build suspense or arouse curiosity:

“With the reindeer it was more complicated. They were always nervous, but it wasn’t just fear of Noah, it was something deeper. You know how some of us animals have powers of foresight? (…) The reindeer were troubled with something deeper than Noah-angst, stranger than storm-nerves; something… long-term. (…) And it was something beyond what we then knew. As it was something beyond what we then knew. As if they were saying, “You think this is the worst? Don’t count on it”. Still, whatever it was, even the reindeer couldn’t be specific about it. Something distant, major… long-term.”

J. Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)

 

Descriptions can be presented in the following way:

· In order of impression: the writer begins with the image that creates the most powerful impact and then describes the peripheral or less compelling images: “He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man, who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)

“When she reached the third window her mouth opened wide, like a newborn chick demanding to be fed. <…> there, hanging round a slender marble neck, was a peerless diamond and ruby necklace. She felt she had seen the magnificent piece of jewelry somewhere before, but she quickly dismissed the thought from her mind, and continued to study the exquisitely set rubies surrounded by perfectly cut diamonds, making up necklace of unparalleled beauty. Without giving a moment’s thought to how much the object might cost, Consuela walked slowly towards the thick glass door at the entrance to the shop, and pressed a discreet ivory button on the wall. <…>

Although the room was full of treasures that might in normal circumstances have deserved hours of her attention, Consuela’s mind was focused on only one object”

J. Archer, Cheap at Half the Price (1983)

· In spatial order – organizing physical descriptions of people and places:

“The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference – orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple.”

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

· Zoom in and zoom out techniques bring along a panoramic view then focusing on progressively finer and finer details and ending with a close-up description of one aspect of the scene or vice versa, these are two cinematography terms applied to writing:

“The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

Duration refers to the relationship between the length of time over which a given event occurs in the story and the number of pages of narrative devoted to describing it. Thus, duration is what produces the sense of narrative speed. To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf comprises three parts of different duration (the second one is the shortest but still covers the period of ten years, while the first and the third render the events of one day).

Frequency involves the relationship between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story (the same event may occur more than once) and in the narrative (a single event may be described more than once).

The plot is the chain of events which are gradually unfolded in accordance with the author’s conception and the way the novel is arranged. Plots involve series of actions that are connected to one another and that are resolved in a logical manner. Plots generally include conflict of some kind that generates interest, suspense, emotional involvement. According to Aristotle, in a well-constructed plot everything hangs together, and changing one thing will wreck the plot’s unity and impact. A long story or a novel may have several lines of the plot, interwoven, sometimes whimsically entangled. Subplot or side-story is a ploy line that has no direct connection to the main one and to main characters, but is important for understanding various aspects of the characters’ personalities and the world created by the author. It is also possible to imitate the stream of consciousness and to offer random events from which readers can construct some stories in their own minds.

The following elements of the plot are distinguished:

· exposition (rising action) sets the scene giving the revealing description of the main characters and their relationships or introducing the central conflict, it may contain a short presentation of time and place; the action “rises” until there is some crises, after which it recedes and a resolution to the story provided;

· knot (the starting point and the subsequent unfolding of the main line of the plot);

· complication -separate incident helping to unfold the action, it might involve thoughts and feelings as well; sometimes a complication is internal and involves a character who is torn between two choices, each of which is problematic; in other cases “good” characters oppose “bad” ones and the complication is easily recognizable.

· climax (crises) -the highest intensive point in a story, the decisive moment on which the fate of the character and the final action depend; most stories have a climax that leads to some resolution;

· denouement [dei'nu:maŋ] (“the untying of a knot”, resolution) – subsequent events after the climax, denouement fits the nature and scope of the action that has occurred before it. Resolution without adequate motivation, with an unexpected or improbable event weakens a narrative.

There are the following plot devices:

· plot twist (any unexpected turn of the story that gives a new view on its entire topic);

· foreshadowing, flash-forward and flashback;

· red herring (distracting the readers’ attention from the plot twists);

· placing characters in jeopardy creates influence and suspense;

· dramatic irony (a state that occurs when a story resolves itself in ways not anticipated (and generally the opposite of what is desired) by a particular character – for example, most Roald Dahl’s stories are based on dramatic irony – the famous sommelier turns out to be a cheater in Taste (1951));

· formula (a highly conventional scheme used in a text, involving stock characters and recognizable plot structure; genre texts such as science fiction stories, detective stories, and romances are often highly formulaic – they take place in certain kinds of locations and have specific characters who engage in predictable kinds of actions);

· framing (frame is a story that provides the means of telling other stories within it; framing, or text-in-a-text device, is very popular with contemporary authors – Paul Auster’s Invisible is about an established writer reading a book of his friend, editing it, making investigations about it);

· meta-reference (the characters display an awareness that they are in a book).

The plot is based on the conflict as a driving force in literature. A realistic fictional disagreement must rise naturally out of the personalities and attitudes of the characters.

 

Questions

What is the plot structure of the story? Is the action linear, circular, or fragmentary? How predictable are the events in the unfolding story? Are there any events that seem similar or contrasting? What is the central conflict? Does the story use a particular idea or phrase as a recurrent leitmotif? Are there any events that don’t relate to this conflict? Is it important to know the plot of the novel, not just in terms of what happens, but in terms of how the plot provides a framework for the themes and ideas? Which episodes were given the greatest emphasis? Where does the narrative begin (in medias res or ab ovo)? Does the narrative follow the chronological order of events or rearrange it? Is the end clear-cut and conclusive or does it leave room for suggestion? How does the objective, chronological time relate to the subjective, psychological time?

Language in use for analysis

a good narrative technique

a writer of great narrative power

gloomy descriptions of nature

unlikely coincidences

to enhance the expressiveness of the description

to spin a moving and bitter-sweet story with the usual skill

a plot of classical cunning and intricacy

a brilliantly crafted story

one of the most inventive and least predictable authors

montage techniques

to enthrall the readers with vivid descriptions of

The narrator speaks to us without any ironic intervention by the author.

The twists in the plot are surprising.

The book is full of funny anecdotes, keen observation and intelligent exploration of…

The conclusion reinforces the dominant impression.

 

Questions

Who is telling the story – one person or a number of different people? How much does a story-teller know about what is going on in the minds of the characters? Identify the voice. What does the voice have to do with what is happening in the text? How involved in the action or reflection is the voice? What is the perspective or 'point of view' of the speaker (social, intellectual, political, even physical)? Think about the narrative viewpoint. From whose point of view the story is told? Which narrative situation prevails? Why might the author have made that choice? Identify the narrator. How much does the narrator know? Is the narrative factual / dry / emotional / credible / melodramatic? Skim the text and underline references to the narrator. Is the gender clear from this extract? What kind of focalisation prevails?

Language in use for analysis

The story is told from the point of view of…

traditional / unconventional narration

to report events

to address the reader directly

pretend autobiography

common from 17th century onwards

alternating narrators

multiple first-person accounts

to address imaginary readers / other characters

invisible orderer of events

God-like third person

Narration: fragmentary, impressionistic, subjective

shifting viewpoint

The reader is required to piece the events together

The repertoire of forms is cumulative

The writer plays knowingly with this range of possibilities

to root in oral traditions

The narrator speaks to us without any ironic intervention by the author.

The voice of the narrator is immensely flexible. It ranges from reflective amusement to anger / resignation / tenderness / exasperation / fear and horror…

The voice of the central character has a distinct role, though it can always be modified by direct intervention of the narrator’s own voice.

The art of the writer lies in his careful movement between the point of view of his protagonist and that of his watchful, linguistically exact, narrator.

SETTING AND ENVIRONMENT

Narrative requires a setting, which may vary from concrete to general, and often has a particular culturally coded significance. Setting can create an appropriate atmosphere arousing some expectations of events to come or indirectly characterise the personages.

There is the setting in terms of time and place and the setting in terms of the physical world.

The actual place or places in which the events happen can be significant for several reasons. Any physical object might be described:

· in specific detail, as single or multiple locations for characters in action (providing a realistic background). Consider the way A. Trollope describes the setting in The Warden (1855): “Hiram’s Hospital, as the retreat is called, is a picturesque building enough, and shows the correct taste with which the ecclesiastical architects of those days were imbued. It stands on the banks of the little river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge, and, looking from this bridge, the stranger will see the windows of the old men’s rooms, each pair of windows separated by a small buttress. A broad gravel walk runs between the building and the river, which is always trim and cared for; and at the end of the walk, under the parapet of the approach to the bridge, is a large and well-worn seat, on which, in mild weather, three or four of Hiram’s bedesmen are sure to be seen seated. ”

· in a more tonal way as the scenery and the atmosphere the characters perceive and interpret, thus being used the physical environment can reflect the moods and behaviour of the characters in the novel, and establish the mood of the narrative, and create associations; weather description is frequently a projection of human emotions onto phenomena in the natural world: “The evening of this day was very long, and melancholy, at Hartfield. The weather added what it could of gloom. A cold stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling, and the length of the day, which only made such cruel sights the longer visible.” (Jane Austen, Emma (1816)). Shakespeare in Macbeth insinuates a comparison between what is happening in human terms and in terms of nature. On the night of Duncan’s death there is a sudden storm in which chimneys are blown off and houses shaken; mysterious screams are heard; horses go wild; a falcon is killed by a mousing owl.

· as a motif (in Ice (1967) by Anna Kavan the setting is unspecific in terms of time and place, but snowy, icy, frozen environment described sets the main motif of narcotic dreams and people’s isolation);

· as acquiring aesthetic meaning and assuming symbolic or allegoric role (allegory ties an image or event to a specific interpretation, a doctrine or idea; symbols refer to broader, more generalized meanings). In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway’s famous anti-war love story, the setting is used symbolically: the mountain symbolizes life and hope; the plain is the image of war and death; we soon see rain as another symbol of death;

· as creating a moral, political and social environment, referring to the world of the novel in the sense of social inclusion and exclusion as well as drawing and transgression of boundaries marked by race, class, gender, religion, nation, etc.; the society the novel describes can include geographical setting, but also encompasses social and historical factors that help to identify the nature of the novel’s world. The world of the novel may be as small as a family or as large as a whole country, it can be the focal point of conflict. Setting can characterise the social status (wealth/poverty, aristocracy/bourgeoisie), character traits (independence/tendency to imitation, taste/lack of taste, practicality/impracticality, etc.), sphere of interests and views.

Fiction generally claims to represent 'reality' (this is known as representation, or mimesis) in some way; however, because any narrative is presented through the symbols and codes of human meaning and communication systems, fiction cannot represent reality directly, and different narratives and forms of narrative represent different aspects of reality. A narrative might be very concrete and adhere closely to time and place, representing every-day events; on the other hand, it may represent psychological, moral or spiritual aspects through symbols, characters (used representatively), improbable events, and other devices.

So, setting can be used for a variety of purposes; consider this a spectrum: concrete - tonal - connotative - symbolic - allegorical.

Scenery plays special role in a literary work. Scenery can be lyrical (not connected directly with the plot), of primary importance for the plot development, fantastic or symbolic.

 

Questions

How does the extract make use of setting? Where and when does the story take place? What mood is created? How does the setting affect the events? How are the physical setting and psychological events related? What impression do you receive from the passage? Go through the passage and underline words and phrases that create a particular effect. What is the importance of the physical environment in the text you are studying? Are there examples of symbolic use of place (semantic space, externalised mirror image of character)? How is the setting used: to create a sense of realism? / to create mood? / to represent or create states of mind or feelings?/ to stand for other things? Is it a single setting or multiple settings? Does it relate to cultural context? What is the interrelation between the objective location and perceived atmosphere, between internal space and external space?

CHARACTERISATION

 

Characterisation is the ways in which the personalities and motivations of characters are portrayed. Characters in a work of fiction are generally designed to open up or explore certain aspects of human experience; they often depict particular traits of human nature. The fictional character is influenced by literary, historical, and cultural concepts and conventions. When we think about characters in a prose text we should consider their appearance, personality and behaviour; how the author presents them; how they fit into the development of the themes and ideas. Characters are literary constructions created by the author, and are there to contribute to the text’s ideas and purpose.

Characters can be lyrical (the writer focuses on their feelings and thoughts), dramatic (interacted in dialogues through speeches and remarks), epic (the author describes their actions, appearance, background, life events).

There are various methods of characterisation:

· Character through appearance: characters’ appearance can reflect important aspects of personality and attitude. Description of a character’s appearance (face, figure, clothes) can indicate some aspects of personality, social and economic status, health and well-being, illustrate change and development, show a state of mind, place the character as a specific type. A character’s portrait can be static (complete description of the appearance) or dynamic (the details are revealed throughout the whole story). Clothes are always a useful index of characters’ class and life-style. In Therapy (1995) by D. Lodge the main character, Laurence Passmore, gives his self-description in an ironic and self-mocking way: “I am fifty-eight years old, five feet nine-and-a-half inches tall and thirteen stone eight pounds in weight – which is two stone more than it should be according to the table in our dog-eared copy of the Family Book of Health. (…) They say that inside every fat man there’s a thin man struggling to get out, and I hear his stifled groans every time I look into the bathroom mirror. (…) My chest is covered with what looks like a doormat-sized Brillo pad that grows right up to my Adam’s apple: If I wear an open-necked shirt, wiry tendrils sprout from the top like some kind of fast-growing fungus from outer space in an old Nigel Kneale serial. And by a cruel twist of genetic fate I have practically no hair above the Adam’s apple. My pate is as bald as an electric light bulb, like my father’s, apart from a little fringe around the ears, and at the nape, which I wear very long, hanging down over my collar. It looks a bit tramp-like, but I can hardly bear to have it cut, each strand is so precious. (…) I considered growing a beard, but I was afraid it would look like a continuation of my chest. So there’s nothing to disguise the ordinariness of my face: a pink, puffy oval, creased and wrinkled like a slowly deflating balloon, with pouchy cheeks, a fleshy, slightly bulbous nose and two rather sad looking watery-blue eyes. My teeth are nothing to write home about, either, but they are my own, the ones you can see anyway. My neck is as thick as a tree-trunk, but my arms are rather short, making it difficult to buy shirts that fit”.

· Character through speech: characters may also be revealed through their speech (both what they say and how they say it). Speech and dialogue reveal their thoughts and feelings, indicate how characters react to each other, further the plot, create a range of effects such as humour, tension, realism. Characters’ speech can also show their social and educational background. In Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) Mrs. Malaprop decks her dull chat with hard words which she does not understand: “I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs” (the comic character uses “reprehend”, “oracular”, “derangement”, “epitaphs” instead of “apprehend”, “vernacular”, “arrangement”, “epithets”). Charles Dickens is a great master of speech characteristics, let’s see the way he renders the speech of strange Mr. Pickwick and his friends encountered on their first day’s journey: “Come along, then,” said he of the green coat, lugging Mr. Pickwick after him by main force, and talking the whole way. “Here, No. 924, take your fare, and take yourself off – respectable gentleman – know him well – none of your nonsense - - this way, Sir – where’s your friends? – all a mistake, I see – never mind – accidents will happen – best regulated families – never say die – down upon your luck – pull him up – put that in his pipe – like the flavour – damned rascals.” And with a lengthened string of similar broken sentences, delivered with extraordinary volubility, the stranger led the way to the traveller’s waiting room, whither he was closely followed by Mr. Pickwick and his disciples.” (Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37))

· Character through comparison: characters may be given in comparison/contrast with each other. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a story about two “bad boys”, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. Tom is very romantic. His view of life comes from books about knights in the Middle Ages. Huck, however, is a real outsider. He has harder life and never sees the world in the romantic way. In the following extract Fey Weldon presents two female characters in sharp contrast to each other: “Avril was scraggy, haggard and pitifully brave. Helen was solid and worthy and could afford to be gracious. Avril had been Helen’s very first client, thirty years before, when she, Helen, had finished her apprenticeship. In those days Avril had worn expensive, daring green shoes with satin bows, all the better to flirt in: Helen had worn cheap navy shoes with sensible heels, all the better to work in. Helen envied Avril. Today Avril’s shoes, with their scuffed high heels, were stillgreen, but somehow vulgar and pitiable, and the legs above them were knotted with veins. And Helen’s shoes were still navy, but expensive and comfortable, and had sensible medium heels. And Helen owned the salon, and had a husband and grown children, and savings, and a dog a cat and a garden, and Avril had nothing. Nothing. Childless, unmarried, and without property or money in the bank. Now Helen pitied Avril, instead of envying her, but somehow couldn’t get Avril to understand that this switch had occurred (F. Weldon, The Bottom Line and the Sharp End). Not only fictional characters can be contrasted – Paul Auster contrasts historical personalities the way the narrator perceives them: “No one ever talks about Poe and Thoreau in the same breath. They stand at opposite ends of American thought. But that’s the beauty of it. A drunk from the North – reactionary in his politics, aristocratic in his bearing, spectral in his imagination. And a teetotaler from the North – radical in his views, puritanical in his behavior, clear-sighted in his work. Poe was artifice and the gloom of midnight chambers. Thoreau was simplicity and radiance of the outdoors.” (P. Auster The Brooklyn Follies (2005)).

• Character through psychological analysis: creation of the inner world of the characters depicting their feelings, thoughts, etc. In St Mawr (1924) D.H. Lawrence analyses the psychological contradictions of Rico, the main character: “He behaved in a most floridly elegant fashion, fascinating to the Italians. But at the same time he was canny and shrewd and sensible as any young poser could be and, on principle, good-hearted, anxious. He was anxious for his future, and anxious for his place in the world, he was poor, and suddenly wasteful in spite of all his tension of economy, and suddenly spiteful in spite of all his ingratiating efforts, and suddenly ungrateful in spite of all his burden of gratitude, and suddenly rude in spite of all his good manners, and suddenly detestable in spite of all his suave, courtier-like amiability”. In The Rainbow (1915) Lawrence presents psychological insight how the father feels about a new-born child: “From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent?

He had the infant in his arms, he walked backwards and forwards troubled by the crying of his own flesh and blood. This was his own flesh and blood crying! His soul rose against the voice suddenly breaking out from him, from the distances in him. <…> He could not bear to hear it crying. His heart strained and stood on guard against the whole universe.

· Character through direct author’s characterisation: In Cabala (1926) Thornton Wilder gives thorough character analysis (including portrait, manners, background, character insight) through the first-person narrative: “The Princess d’Espoli was exceedingly pretty in a fragile Parisian way; her vivacious head, surmounted by a mass of sandy reddish hair, was for ever tilted above one or other of her thin pointed shoulders; her whole character lay in her sad laughing eyes and small red mouth. Her father came of the Provençal nobility, and she had spent her girlhood partly in provincial convent schools and partly climbing like a goat the mountains that surrounded her father’s castle. At eighteen she and her sister had been called in from the cliffs, dressed up stiffly and hawked like merchandise through the drawing rooms of their more influential relatives in Paris, Florence and Rome. Her sister had fallen to an automobile manufacturer and was making the good and bad weather of Lyons; Alix had marked the morose Prince d’Espoli, who had immediately sunk into a profounder misanthropy. He remained at home sunk in the last dissipations. His wife’s friends never saw or referred to him; occasionally we became aware of him, we thought, in her late arrivals, hurried departures and harassed air. She had lost two children in infancy. She had no life, save in other people’s homes. Yet the sum of her sufferings had been the production of the sweetest strain of gaiety that we shall ever see, a pure well of heartbroken frivolity. Wonderful though she was in all the scenes of social life, she certainly was at her finest at table, where she had graces and glances that the most gifted actresses would fall short of conceiving for their Millamonts and Rosalinds and Célimènes; nowhere has been such charm, such manners and such wit. She would prattle about her pets, describe a leave-taking seen by chance in a railway station, or denounce the Roman fire departments with a perfection of rendering of Yvette Guilbert, a purer perfection in that it did not suggest the theatre. She possessed the subtlest mimicry, and could sustain an endless monologue, but the charm of her gift resided in the fact that it required the collaboration of the whole company; it required the exclamations, contradictions and even concerted shouts as of a Shakespearean mob before the Princess could display her finest art. She employed an unusually pure speech, a gift that went deeper than mere aptitude for acquiring grammatical correctness in the four principal languages of Europe; its source lay in the type of her mind. Her thought proceeded complicatedly, but not without order, in long looping parenthesis, a fine network of relative clauses, invariably terminating in some graceful turn by way of climax, some sudden generalization or summary surprise”. M. Puzo gives direct characterization of Fredo, Mafia boss’ son: “The second son, Frederico, called Fred or Fredo, was a child every Italian prayed to the saints for. Dutiful, loyal, always at the service of his father, living with his parents at age of thirty. He was short and burly, not handsome but with the same Cupid head of the family, the curly helmet of hair over the round face and sensual bow-shaped lips. Only, in Fred, these lips were not sensual but granitelike. Inclined to dourness, he was still a crutch to his father, never disputed him, never embarrassed him by scandalous behavior with women. Despite all these virtues he did not have that personal magnetism, that animal force, so necessary for a leader of men, and he too was not expected to inherit the family business (M. Puzo, The Godfather (1969)).

· Character through setting description and detail. Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis is the story of the perfect conformist who tries to revolt against the values of his surroundings. It starts with the hero rising out of his bed and going into the bathroom: “Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to.”

· Character through action: actions and reactions of characters in different situations shape our view of them. D.S. Mackenzie gives a terrifying account of the character’s actions showing his cruelty: “It is his barn. Mr. McLeod has the hoe in his hand and he is poking about with it above his head at the ends of the rafters where the sloping roof meets the top of the wall. What is he doing? <…>I make my way towards Mr McLeod. There are tiny shrieks of alarm from a half-fledged baby pigeon which whirs down on immature wings from the rafters to the floor about halfway between McLeod and me. It sets off running towards me. I have never seen one so close before and I bend down towards it in wonder at the strange mixture of grey feathers and pink flesh. I am half aware that Mr McLeod is coming up behind the little bird, in fact he is running. I have my hands out, feeling I might be able to scoop up this little creature but just before it reaches me Mr McLeod shouts a warning. He overtakes the squawking, frightened, scurrying bird and kills it by stamping its head into the concrete floor. I am too shocked to cry” (D.S. Mackenzie, The Language of Water). The author shows lack of tact and ingratitude of his character in the following passage: “He spent some time in South Africa when he was a young man and I once gave him a book about the area he had lived in. He was scathingly critical of the book, leafing through it when I gave it to him and criticizing it even before he had read it properly. I was hurt by this, feeling he should have tempered his comments, particularly as the book was a gift. I had just returned from South Africa, though not the same place as he had lived in. I felt that he was indirectly criticising me as well, the inference being that I should know better. I had been there and therefore I should know better <…> In fact Garfield didn’t say this at all. Neither did he say thank you (D.S. Mackenzie, The Language of Water).

· A name can suggest an individual. Comic, satiric or didactic writers can be exuberantly inventive, or obviously allegorical, in their naming (Rebecca Sharp, Thwackum, Pilgrim); realistic novelists favour mundane names with appropriate connotations (Emma Woodhouse). Some writers, like Poe, prefer names for the quality of their musical sound (Eulalie, Lenore, Ulalume). Postmodernists can push the connotative significance of names in literary texts to an absurdist extreme. In Paul Auster’s Ghosts (1986) all the characters have the names of colours: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over. That is how it begins…”

· Character through imagery: sometimes characters are described through images and symbols which are associated with them throughout the novel. Take as an example The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), the best known tale by E. Poe. The setting reveals the character of the hero: a crack in the house symbolizes the relationship between the adult twins, Roderick and Madeline Usher. In The Captain’s Doll (1921) by D.H. Lawrence the doll directs the story from beginning to end. On the first page Hannele is making the doll; on the last she burns the painting of it. The author asserts: “If woman loves you, she’ll make a doll out of you”.