Spenser never thought about their relationship, which meant that he never thought about her”.

Sometimes a story is told by multiple narrators. While reading a novel told in this way, one is to look for how different narrators’ views of people and events differ from each other, and consider the effects that are created by the reader being drawn into separate yet complementary worlds. In Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, for example, a series of narrators take over the story at different points, contributing to the novel’s dense, multi-layered effect. BleakHouse (1853) by Charles Dickens has two distinct narrative voices, the character Esther Summerson, and a third-person narrator who presents the parts of the narrative in which Esther does not feature. Julian Barnes’s Talking it over (1991) and Love, etc. (2001) are a presentation of the same events from the point of view of the main characters who form a love triangle.

Dramatic point of view presents the story objectively, mostly through dialogues. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) his simple style, careful structuring and dialogues help to get the most out of the least.

The physical location from which a writer views a subject is called the vantage point. In the essay Shooting an Elephant (1936), George Orwell recalls when he was called upon to deal with a rampaging elephant. Orwell uses the vantage point of the narrator surrounded by two thousand hostile villagers. Telling the story from this vantage point helps the reader gain greater appreciation of the pressures and circumstances that led Orwell to shoot the elephant.

“But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of faces above the garish clothes – faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hand I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I would have to shoot the elephant. (…) The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two-thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.”

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (1936)

Vantage point can also refer to a distancing in time. For example, George Orwell wrote Shooting an Elephant (1936) long after the incident took place. Looking back at the event from the vantage point of time contributes to the ironic tone and sense of shame that permeate the essay.

Distance is created when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, a “go-between” through whose consciousness the story is filtered. The more intrusive the narrator, the greater the distance between narration and story. Conversely, the least distance is created when we are unaware of the narrator’s presence, when a tale seems to “tell itself”. Distance is also created by the absence of descriptive detail. Thus, the least distance, or the greatest imitation of life, is produced by maximum information and minimum presence of the narrator.

Perspective refers to point of view, or the eyes through which we see any given part of narrative. Although the narrator may be speaking, the point of view may be that of one of the other characters, and the feeling of the point-of-view character may be different from those of the narrator.

Voice refers to the voice of the narrator. Voice may be said to almost synonymous with tone, it is voice that creates tone. The voice we hear (the narrator’s) may not be the same as the eyes we see through (the perspective). When we analyze the voice, we analyze the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told). Voice helps us to determine the narrator’s attitude toward the story and reliability. The voice of the story-teller may be anonymous (like in a folk tale – “Once upon a time…”), the voice of the epic bard (Virgil’s “Arms and the man I sing”), the confiding, sententious, intrusive authorial voice of classic fiction. After the turn of the XX century the intrusive authorial voice has tended to be suppressed or eliminated, the action is presented through the consciousness of the characters or by handing over to them the narrative task.

We can also distinguish voice (who speaks) and focalisation (who perceives) of the work of literature. Bal prefers the term “focalisation” to “point of view”, because she believes “point of view” is a deficient and misleading term. Mostly it refers to omniscient narrators, naïve narrators, and so on. Bal notes that it is important to make an explicit distinction between, on the one hand, the vision through which the elements are presented (who sees) and, on the other, the identity of the voice that is verbalising that vision (who speaks). The invisible, covert narrator is merely a voice that reports information. The author passes on the task of evaluating the story to the reader. The overt narrator appears as a mediator in the discourse, introduces himself/herself and the stories to the reader, gives comments that guide the readers’ understanding. As to the narrator’s position the heterodiegetic narrator does not belong to the world of the characters, the homodiegetic narrator belongs to the story world and is called autodiegetic if telling the own life story.

The narrator’s presentation can be reliable or unreliable. The reader has basically three strategies to test the reliability of the narrative, to check its consistency, coherence and correspondence. A consistent narrative does not reveal contradictions between the narrator’s words and actions, values and judgements, self-image and images the others have. A coherent narrative presents a story in which one event leads to another without significant logical gaps.

There is no direct correspondence between reality and fiction, which creates its own world, but rather one between the fictional models of reality and the dominant view of the world at the time of writing. Strange characters and unreliable narrators defamiliarise the vision of the world and challenge our views.

The story is presented in the text through the mediation of some prism, perspective, angle of vision verbalized by the narrator. Anglo-American term for this is “point of view” though “focalisation” is more preferable term as it includes not only grammatical parameter, but also cognitive and emotive one. For example in Timbuktu (1999) by Paul Auster the narrative is the third person, but everything is perceived through the dog’s eyes. So the user of the third person is the narrator and Mr. Bones is focalizer. Focalisation asks who perceives, what, in which way. Focalisation and narration are separate and distinct things.

Types of focalisation depend upon two criteria: position relative to the story and degree of persistence.

· According to the position relative to the story focalisation can be external or internal. Internal focalisation locates the perspective within a character, limiting the information to his/her perceptual and conceptual grasp of the world. This type generally takes the form of a character focalizer (as in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.P. Salinger). External focalisation presents information of characters’ external behaviour, such as speech and action, excluding feelings and thoughts. Its vehicle is a narrator-focalizer. This type is predominant in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to mention a few works.

· According to the degree of persistence focalisation can vary between fixed focalisation, which is restricted to one and the same perspective throughout the narrative (J. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)), variable focalisation, which presents different scenes through different perspectives (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)), or multiple focalisation, which invites comparisons between several perspectives of the same event (Julian Barnes, Talking It Over (1991)and Love, etc. (2001)).

There are different facets of focalisation:

· The perceptual facet (space and time) concerns the sensual range of the focalizer.In spatial terms the external/internal position of the focalizer takes the form of a bird’s-eye view (panoramic view or simultaneous focalisation of things happening in different places) vs. that of a limited observer. In temporal terms, external focalization is panchronic in the case of an unpersonified focalizer, and retrospective in the case of a character focalising his own past. On the other hand, internal focalisation is synchronous with the information regulated by the focalizer.

· The psychological facet deals with the focalizer’s mind and emotions. There are two components: cognitive (unrestricted/restricted knowledge) and emotive (uninvolved/involved).

· The ideological facet concerns the ideology of the focalizer that can be presented as authoritative, or there can be a juxtaposition of different views. The view can be presented in implicit or explicit way.

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?