Narrative Voice in Auden’s Poetry - PowerPoint Presentation

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Narrative Voice in Auden’s PoetrySlide2

1

st

September 1939

First person narration, presumably from the point of view of Auden himself.

There is no climactic event in the poem but the narrative voice reaches an emotional destination, making a comment on the deterioration of society.

Voice is a key theme:

“I will be true to the wife”

Who can release them now/ who can reach the deaf/ who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voiceSlide3

As I Walked Out One Evening

Each of the three speakers represents different attitudes towards time.

The lover: This character is naïve, and the voice is hyperbolic, giving the impression of an innocent youth.

The narrator: This voice acts as a bystander, perhaps nature personified due to the fact that it still remains even after the lovers are gone.

Time: Time personified speaks in a completely different tone to the sing-song naivety of the lovers, and acts as a reiteration of reality, and the inconsequential nature of humans.Slide4

O What Is That Sound?

The dialogue throughout the poem gives two alternating narrative voices, on the questioner, and one the partner.

Through the course of the poem, the questioner moves from innocence to understanding the danger faced.

The fact that the questioner’s voice is the first we hear means that the reader is even more affected by the abandonment and betrayal of the second voice, evoking a stronger emotive response.

It is unclear who the pair of voices belong to, but it can be assumed they are from a pair of lovers, although gender is still unclear.Slide5

Musée

des Beaux Arts

The narrator is completely anonymous – the reader learns nothing about his opinions, gender, anything except his location, which is given in the title: he is absent from the poem.

“In a novel, he’d be a third person narrative voice. In a Disney movie he might just be a conscience. In this poem however, he’s a speaker who doesn’t ever move outside the tight frame of reference. He’s sitting before a single painting, and his mind is completely absorbed in what’s before him.” Shmoop.Slide6

Miss Gee

The third person narrator immediately has the effect of belittling Miss Gee’s character and making her seem insignificant, helping to prevail her lonely life.

The tone of the narrator is strikingly light and whimsical, contrasting with the fact that the poem focuses on mortality and the loneliness of a woman constrained by society.

The voices of both sets of doctors de-personifies her, and adds the idea that Miss Gee “deserved” her fate because of her childless and isolated state.Slide7

Victor

The voice of Victor’s father acts as the voice of reason, good teachings,

C

hristian values and develops through the poem to represent the voice of God

The voice of the narrator, omniscient and unaffected by the events of the poem, could also come to represent God

The clerks’ voices represent the voice of society, the decaying morals of the time when Auden wrote the poem and societal expectations.

The third person narration allows us to see Victor’s journey without the emotional attachment/ bias of having a first person narration by Victor himself.Slide8

James Honeyman

The voice of the narrator, just like in Victor, gives the view of a bystander, possibly representative of God due to the omniscient nature.

The teacher and tutor in the poem show the views of society, recognising the talents and abilities of Honeyman, but speculating at the consequences of his social inaptitude.

Honeyman’s wife’s voice gives the representation of an innocent: she loves her husband and so does not appreciate the consequences of her husbands actions until it is too late.

The son of James Honeyman

gives the voice of the next generation, who will inevitably pick up the broken pieces of the world after the war has ended. He blames not his father, but the poison itself, suggesting that it is the environment in which they live, not the actual man, which destroys them.Slide9

The Kite Runner

The adult voice of Amir is the first person narrator for a majority of the novel, giving a very personal and emotional description of events.

We get glimpses from dialogue mostly about the other characters’ opinions and perspectives, for example Baba and Rahim Khan’s conversation about his fears for Amir.

Rahim Khan’s chapter narrating the story shows a turning point: for one, up until this point Amir has, perhaps selfishly, monopolised narration but is now sharing, and for another thing Rahim has stayed in Afghanistan and has had a completely different experience to Amir in America, so is able to fill him in on a personal level about the thing that would really matter to Amir and to the reader.

Amir's narrative voice is fairly consistent across most of the

novel, but the

vocabulary and sentence structure

develops over time. This

style is already starting to show signs of maturity as the narrative reaches the point of Hassan's rape: the trauma of

Hassan’s rape shows the change in complexity and the childish tone is dropped.Slide10

The Great Gatsby

The main protagonist of the story is not the narrator: Nick Caraway, for the most part an outsider to the events of the novel narrates. He is a peripheral narrator.

Nick, though claiming to be an impartial observer, is untrustworthy and some of his personal opinions and experiences colour the narrative. Also the fact that he has to rely on others to learn important details (for example getting the details of Gatsby and Daisy’s love affair from Jordan, a notorious liar) makes him a questionable choice for narrator.

Again, Nick does not completely monopolise the narrative, by allowing other key characters to contribute important events to the story, adding an alternative viewpoint.

The character of Nick is also very interesting, in that through his narration we learn snippets of his own life events, for example a story of a ‘girl’ back home, but these details are never revealed explicitly to the reader.