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role of the narrator
Essays on Christopher Marlowe
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Story telling has been a means of communicating a point of view by a novelist to his readers and also of handing down tradition, folklore and culture. A story originates in the mind of an individual as he/she gives shape to his perception of an experience weaving the magic of his/her narration. A narrator brings to life images that excite the imagination of his/her listeners, enabling them to create a world which is inhabited by the characters of his/her stories which are not only meaningful, but serve to emulate human experience itself.
In every narrative there is a hidden narrator. A narrator is either a first person narrator or a third person narrator… “First person narrative means writing from the “I” point of view…Third person narrative form is writing from the omniscient point of view…Second person is the least-used form in novels, mainly because it usually reads more awkwardly”…(Harper 2004 ,1). Occasionally, one comes across a second person narrator as well, in which he narrates from the ‘you’ point of view. The reader sees the world that the novelist portrays through the narrator and after having read a novel, he returns to reality: ‘we might substitute for our own life an obsessive reading of novels, or dreams based on novelistic models’ (Bakhtin, 32). The novelist creates a situation which appears to be real and he also creates characters that are "free people, capable of standing alongside,"(Bakhtin 6)
A novelist may allow the narrator to have more knowledge than that of an ordinary person and he may even limit the knowledge that he allows the narrator to have. He may use a single source of information which is personified as the narrator or he may use a source of information which is less specific. Joseph Conrad’s ...
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4. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies In Technique, New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, 1988.
5 .Berthoud, Jacques (1978. Cambridge University Press) Joseph Conrad
6. Booth, Wayne C. “Telling and Showing”. (From: Twentieth Century Criticism. The Major Statements). Ed. William J. Handy &Max Westbrook. Indian Edition: (1976). Light & Life Publishers, New Delhi.
7. Conrad, Joseph. Author’s note to The Rescue. London: Penguin Modern Classics 1978
8 . Harper, Tara K. “First Person or Third”. 2004. Writer’s Workshop. Web. 20 February. 2012.
9. Peters, John G. (ed): A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Print.
WEB SOURCES:
1.Woolf, Virginia. Joseph “Conrad” from The Common Reader. http//ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/Virginia/w91c/chapter20.html.n.d.Web. 18 July 2011.
When writing literature, authors will adapt points of view to mold the perceptions of their readers. Three points of view that authors use to draw readers into their works of fiction are the limited perspective, the first-person perspective, and the objective perspective. Three stories will be examined and critiqued for their use of these narrative techniques. Of the three perspectives that will be examined, the first-person perspective is the most useful for sharing the authors’ vision.
Heller, Joseph. The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. Twentieth-Century American Literature Vol. 3. New York. Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Cox, C. B. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987.
A narrative is specified to amuse, to attract, and grasp a reader’s attention. The types of narratives are fictitious, real or unification or both. However, they may consist of folk tale stories, mysteries, science fiction; romances, horror stories, adventure stories, fables, myths and legends, historical narratives, ballads, slice of life, and personal experience (“Narrative,” 2008). Therefore, narrative text has five shared elements. These are setting, characters, plot, theme, and vocabulary (“Narrative and Informational Text,” 2008). Narrative literature is originally written to communicate a story. Therefore, narrative literature that is written in an excellent way will have conflicts and can discuss shared aspects of human occurrence.
Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad in Berdichev, Poland, in 1857. He grew up in the Polish Ukraine, a large society, abundant plain between Russia and Poland. It was a separated nation with four languages, four religions, and a number of diverse social classes. A division of the Polish speaking populations, including Conrad’s family, fitted to the szlachta, a genetics class in the nobility of the social hierarchy, uniting the qualities of gentry and dignity. They had political authority and notwithstanding their underprivileged state.
Heller, Joseph. The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. Twentieth-Century American Literature Vol. 3. New York. Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow can be seen as the hero of the story despite his alternating morals and the fact that Marlow ultimately does nothing to improve the situation in Africa. Throughout the whole narrative Marlow finds himself thrust into many shocking situations yet chooses the path of an observant bystander, giving his own opinion at the time, but no lasting action or motivation is conceived. On top of this fact Marlow’s morals are anything but set in stone; they waver innumerable times over the course of the plot. Yet Marlow is more often than not seen as the prominent hero of the plot. How is this possible? This is because readers aren’t looking for perfection in a character, but depth, and Marlow achieves this level of depth through his epiphanies and the changes that take place in his perception of the world. These revelations in turn challenge the reader to reevaluate themselves.
Wollaeger, Mark A. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: a Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972. 120. Print.
Throughout its entirety, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness utilizes many contrasts and paradoxes in an attempt to teach readers about the complexities of both human nature and the world. Some are more easily distinguishable, such as the comparison between civilized and uncivilized people, and some are more difficult to identify, like the usage of vagueness and clarity to contrast each other. One of the most prominent inversions contradicts the typical views of light and dark. While typically light is imagined to expose the truth and darkness to conceal it, Conrad creates a paradox in which darkness displays the truth and light blinds us from it.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a great example of a Modernist novel because of its general obscurity. The language is thick and opaque. The novel is littered with words such as: inconceivable, inscrutable, gloom. Rather than defining characters in black and white terms, like good and bad, they entire novel is in different shades of gray. The unfolding of events takes the reader between many a foggy bank; the action in the book and not just the language echoes tones of gray.
* Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams, general editor. (London: W.W. Norton, 1962, 2000)
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd Ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton Critical, 1988.