Assignment: To analyze the following lead passages excerpted from various books and identify the voice.
1. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
This story is being told in first person by what I assume is a male in his 20s or 30s. The reckless activities described–such as driving while on drugs–tends to conjure a younger, more masculine image. As they say, boys will be boys, and younger people don’t seem to be as aware of their mortality. These characteristics are also assumed of intended audience, who will likely find these exploits laudable.
Additionally, the casual tone of the piece supports the notion of a young narrator. He* speaks colloquially and uses run-on sentences as if he were retelling the story to a friend over drinks. The details, such as exact quotes, are vague and inexact, like his memory. He may even be exaggerating about the speed to sound more impressive. This is a person who likes to do crazy things just so he can live to tell the tale.
Due to the cavalier way drugs are discussed, it seems the story is set in the 1980s. Other works written about that time, such as Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction address the topic in a similar manner. It was a social norm for the upper-middle class to take drugs recreationally.
In this piece, I don’t feel that the voice of the narrator and author can be easily distinguished. The story-telling feel of this passage makes it seem like the author and narrator are one in the same.
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2. In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.
Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It’s the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It’s the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire.
In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem.
In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.
The narrator in this passage is using second person to begin telling the story, but I believe that it would likely switch to first person if one continued reading. Often times people use second person when speaking in generalizations, “you” meaning “someone.”
I believe that the narrator is a modern woman, but a housewife, and it was written for today’s female audience as well. The tasks described that could be completed in that 19 minutes are traditionally feminine, such as baking, child rearing, and house keeping. However, the revelation that this is a revenge tale makes me believe that it is about women taking control and liberating themselves.
The overall tone created is suspenseful due to the repetition. Listing off such mundane tasks build up the tension for the final, unexpected task that is finally revealed. This repetition also makes the narrator seem cold and calculating. The calm way in which revenge is paired up with normal activities shows that the she is not remorseful for whatever it was that she did.
In this piece, I feel that the narrator’s voice could potentially be separated from the author’s. If the story did end up switching to first person as I mentioned, then the difference might become apparent. This opening passage seems that it would be more of the author’s voice, carefully structured and without having much reference to who the narrator actually is. If it switched to first person, then it would seem it would be told from the narrator’s perspective and therefore become the dominant voice.
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3. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lost of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with the digital watches.
This passage, written in third person, seems to be geared to an audience that is more difficult to identify. Rather than having an audience based on gender or age, it seems to be focused more on ideals. The audience must first have a certain type of humor and must be somewhat critical of the world. This has a clear message against materialism, and the intended audience should share that belief.
Although this piece would likely be relevant fifty years from now, I believe that it was probably written sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The reference to the digital watch dates this to roughly this period since, according to Wikipedia, the digital watch was first available to common consumers in 1975.
This harsh tone taken with the human race as a whole initially makes the narrator seem cynical. However, it may be that the story ends up telling a redeeming story of a man or woman living in this world, which would create a more humanistic tone. Since the piece turns us on our heads by poking fun at our very existence, I would expect the latter to be true.
I would best describe the voice in this passage as clever. The way it diminishes our significance isn’t to make the reader feel badly about him or herself. Rather it is trying to get us to re-prioritize; to analyze ourselves and not take things too seriously.
The voice of the author seems dominant here. The narrator as a character is insignificant, and what is being said is the important part. The author clearly has a message to get across, and creating a character to tell it seems secondary. In this case the author and the narrator are one in the same.
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4. He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine – he could see out, but you couldn’t see it. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings and large, well-proportioned rooms. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight. There was a ballroom on the second floor. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah’s great houses still in private hands.
At first, the narrator appears to be either in third or first person. It isn’t until halfway through the passage that the narrator uses the term “we.” The description is stated as fact rather than opinion (though it very well may be), and that sort of power and authority in the voice makes it ambiguous at first. Because of this, it seems that the narrator’s voice and the author’s voice both come in to play. The author seems to be making the description, while the narrator as a character is explaining the events.
The narrator seems to be a woman due to the description of the man entertaining her as “darkly handsome,” though it cannot be for certain since the voice seems to belong more to the author than the character. Even so, I would still assume that the intended audience would also be women.
There isn’t much for me to speculate on for the time of this piece, though I would guess some time from the 1980s to today. The analogy to a limousine is clearly referring to modern vehicle, especially with the tinted windows. If it were not for that clue, it could have seemed much older.
The voice is focused on creating an image rather than a tone, though it is established that the man is a bit creepy and mysterious. It seems formal except for when the narrator says, “it was a mansion, really,” which is only slightly more conversational. Overall, the passage seems more like the author wants things to be explained rather than establish the personality of the narrator. Or perhaps that is the narrator’s personality; unassuming and bland.
*Since I imagine the narrator to be male, the pronoun “he” is used for the sake of simplicity, though it may not be factually correct.
Emmalee