More on POV authorial character and narrative voice

More on…. POV authorial, character and narrative voice

More on…. POV • ‘voice’ represents more than just one element; it encompasses the author’s, narrator’s and characters’ voices which are all important when considering the construction of a short story. A deconstruction or a blurring of these voices would not be acceptable, or sustainable, in a full length novel, thus the short story is an ideal form for experimenting with voice as an unstable and fragmented concept, a technique later developed by the modernist movement.

More on…. POV • there are two contrasting perspectives on voice: it can be fleeting, weak and fading, or permanent, strong and assertive.

More on…. POV • challenges the reader with a complex narrative structure in a condensed and intense literary space.

More on…. POV • destabilises the conventions of authorial, narrative and character voice ultimately to deconstruct the boundaries between the reality and the façade of the literary/fictional space.

More on…. POV • question of the point-of-view – the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story’ (Lubbock 2007: 173). This question of ‘the relation in which the narrator stands to the story’ is pivotal in Mansfield’s tale because the divide between character and narrator reveals the fluid nature of the construction of the self. In the movie, actors and actresses can manipulate their body, and most importantly their voice, to deceive their audience, just as an author can adapt authorial, narrative and character voice to mislead the reader.

More on…. POV • ‘Prince Ramji Rowdedow’ – which is ‘set in Beverley’ (Carnell 2000: 120) – opens with a retrospective, subjective, first person narrative of the village in which the tale is set: I cannot say that Slimeford-on-the-Slushy is a likely town in which to make a great theatrical benefit. . . I cannot say that Slimeford is a fine town or a pretty town [because thoroughfare is] surrounded on all sides by a rising neighbourhood. . . And, O reader, what on the surface of God’s earth, as man has marred it, is more frightful than a rising neighbourhood? (Braddon 1877: 271) The comic and confidential tone creates a conversational and intimate relationship between the narrator and the reader.