When Ruby and Jonathan come home from the island, Barrett describes the scene as follows: He held her against his chest and said, “I have an enzyme for you.”īarrett also uses an interesting POV that I seldom encounter: the third person plural, they. She’d been so taken by Jonathan’s tale that she’d gone to the library to check out the details and discovered he was wrong.īut Jonathan didn’t care what the biochemists said. “Moths have a special enzyme in their saliva,” Ruby would say. One of the couple’s contested origin stories is the time when Jonathan took Ruby’s hand, chewed on her fingernail and swallowed it, after which she became physically a part of him. The narrator alternates between Ruby’s and Jonathan’s POVs, as each try to remember the beginnings of the romance and, to some degree, justify it. Here, I look at the use of the objective POV in a wonderful case of shifting POVs.Īndrea Barrett’s short story “The Littoral Zone” (from the 1996 National Book Award collection Ship Fever) is about Ruby and Jonathan, a zoologist and a botanist who start an extramarital affair while conducting research at a remote New Hampshire island. The best prose would have use of it, even the most stylized ones. Its elegance lies not so much in its lack of opinion than in its being unopinionated. The objective POV is woefully underestimated and misunderstood. This is a severely limited understanding of POV and, rather than enhancing the power of prose, diminishes it. But I’ve seen as many clunky attempts in fiction to capture voice, many forcing quirky speech patterns such as repeating words (“he went, went, went to the supermarket”) or the overuse of italics, certain recurring expressions, dialect, etc. Film and TV, for example, have a hard time the best they can do is resort to voice-overs that are often clunky. We are told that reflecting characters’ personalities in the language-such as by collapsing the distance between the way they speak and the way the story is narrated-is a good thing. The logic has to do with maximizing prose’s flexibility to dip inside the mind. The uninflected prose of an objective narrator has seemingly declined in contemporary literature in favor of the “voicier” POVs such as first person, second person, or third person close.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |