- Jul 2022
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icla2022.jonreeve.com icla2022.jonreeve.com
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“We have certain events to relate,” Mr. Franklin proceeded; “and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn–as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther. We must begin by showing how the Diamond first fell into the hands of my uncle Herncastle, when he was serving in India fifty years since. This prefatory narrative I have already got by me in the form of an old family paper, which relates the necessary particulars on the authority of an eye-witness. The next thing to do is to tell how the Diamond found its way into my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years ago, and how it came to be lost in little more than twelve hours afterwards. Nobody knows as much as you do, Betteredge, about what went on in the house at that time. So you must take the pen in hand, and start the story.”
Mr. Franklin suggests that more first- and third-person narrators i.e., characters in the story, be included to tell the tale about the Diamond and its disappearance. But how reliable is the evidence that each one has to offer? This is probably at the heart of this detective story.
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- Oct 2020
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icla2020b.jonreeve.com icla2020b.jonreeve.com
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But she felt that even the grave bedroom knew her for what she was, shallow, tinkling, vain...
Ouch! I like how the omnipresent narrators in Mansfields' stories are so not objective, like goggles through which we must see the world. Exposed to merely a few short scenes from which we extrapolate to the characters' entire personas, our judgments are very susceptible to the narrators' stance. There's little room for us to perceive Isabel as the martyr, or her friends as exuberant rather than shallow, or William as an ignorant, sullen person who doesn't care much about his family. I wonder if/how narrators' subjectivity could be measured by inspecting adjectives in unquoted lines (e.g., how to distinguish between a description of a person in a scene and a description of a person in general).
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