Comments on: The Wobbly Narrator

By: Connie Hale

Connie Hale — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:05:22 +0000

Thanks for this great example, Bill.

I remember the first time I read Kundera, when The Unforgettable Lightness of Being was excerpted in The New Yorker. I was so convinced by the POV and voice of the first character in the excerpt (Sabina, I think), that I was stunned when the narrator switched to Tomas. How could a writer be so convincing as a woman and a man? The name–Milan–was new to me, and kept the mystery of the author’s gender alive a little longer.

By: Bill Huntzinger

Bill Huntzinger — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 03:58:46 +0000

Milan Kundera does all kinds of wild things with point-of-view. In “Immortality,” he is speaking in first person, as the author, and sits down to lunch with one of his characters. “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Joke,” “The Farewell Party”…all masterful…

By: The Sky’s the Limit | Sin and Syntax

The Sky’s the Limit | Sin and Syntax — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:44:22 +0000

[...] mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve [...]

By: Alexa Hunter

Alexa Hunter — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:15:59 +0000

I was doing Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” with my students today and noticed it contains 3 different POVs. He carries it off wobbly well.

By: Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:43:02 +0000

I, too, am searching for wobbly narrators. (Or, did you say narratives of Wobblies?) Regardless, we scour the newspaper, the radio, the television, even books, for them. When Sarah finds one, she’ll alert Connie. Until then, we (I, you, he, she, and it) must remain vigilant in our quest.

By: Taylor Ferracane

Taylor Ferracane — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:31:09 +0000

Ah yes, the wobbly narrator. I’ve found that I have a secret obsession with second person. Sometimes I write journal entries in second person, but it is so difficult to remain in that person! It is even more difficult to find many published pieces entirely in second person (especially ones that do not wobble). At last, I have found an excellent short story entirely in the second person. It is “Until Gwen” from The Atlantic Monthly by Dennis Lehane. He uses second person perfectly, with such drama. The reader feels like he/she is the protagonist. It is a must read!

By: Connie Hale

Connie Hale — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:45:57 +0000

Bush (back to school!):

Here’s President George H. W. Bush turning into The Wobbly Narrator at a 1988 campaign stop, on the day after Halloween. (If the son couldn’t find the chemical and biological weapons, the father couldn’t find the right point of view):

“We had last night, last night we had a couple of our grandchildren with us in Kansas City—6-year-old twins, one of them went as a package of Juicy Fruit, arms sticking out of the pack, the other was Dracula. A big rally there. And Dracula’s wig fell off in the middle of my speech and I got to thinking, watching those kids, and I said if I could look back and I had been president for four years: What would you like to do Those young kids here. And I’d love to be able to say that working with our allies, working with the Soviets, I’d found a way to ban chemical and biological weapons from the face of the earth.

By: Connie Hale

Connie Hale — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:45:11 +0000

Bellow (bravo!)

Here’s Saul Bellow using the free indirect style in “Seize the Day,” when he slips from being an omniscient narrator (referring to Tommy Wilhelm in the third person) to being inside his protagonist’s head (using “I”):

“Greatly hurt, Wilhelm struggled however to be fair. Old people are bound to change, he said. They have hard things to think about. They must prepare for where they are going. They can’t live by the old schedule any longer and all their perspectives change, and other people become alike, kin and acquaintances. Dad is no longer the same person, Wilhelm reflected. He was thirty-two when I was born, and now he’d going on eighty. Furthermore, it’s time I stopped feeling like a kind toward him, a small son.”