英语短篇小说赏析Chapter III

Point of view refers to the vantage point or place from which the author reveals character, setting and event. The various points of view can be roughly grouped into two broad categories: the first-person narrticipant in the action; and the third-person narrator, who uses ―he‖, ―she‖ or ―they‖ to tell the story, does not participate in the action. The most common and conventional of the third-person narrator is the omniscient narrator who is literally ―all-knowing‖.
Miss Brill. But when the narrator lets the readers out of her head and he reads the conversations of two young people, it becomes clear that the whole conflict of the story lies in Miss Brill. The story also reflects the typical style of Katherine Mansfield: stream-of-consciousness narration to take the reader inside Miss Brill’s mind to learn her isolation, loneliness and to see the actual flow of and interplay between her conscious, semi-conscious, and even unconscious thoughts.
Was it the old man’s heart beat, or did the speaker hear his own heart beat? As to Katherine Mansfield’s ―Miss Brill‖, it is an interior monologue of a lonely woman. This story is told by the third-person omniscient narrator who not only reports what Miss Brill does, feels and thinks but also interprets and comments on her behaviors. It is difficult to find the conflict of the story while reading the first pages, where the readers are made to feel the spirit of the holiday, with people walking and band playing in the park, and where readers see everything ―through‖ the mind of
In the short story ―The Tell-Tale Heart‖, Edgar Allan Poe
skillfully used the first person narrator who speaks directly to the reader about his eyewitness accounts and his personal experience, thoughts and feelings. ―I‖ in the story tries to convince the reader that he is not mad but simply nervous. He attempts to tell his murder of the old man in a calm way, but as he describes various parts, he begins shouting with a great level of passion. The murder is gothic and detailed. After killing the man he buried his pieces of body under the boards. His fevered imagination brought him to great heights of creativity and the depths of paranoiac despair when he heard the noise within his ears.
Chapter III Point of View
Questions for Thinking: 1. What is point of view in literature / fiction? 2. How to distinguish different points of view in the story? 3. Do you know the stream of consciousness and interior monologue in literature?