4. Dramatic point of view (objective point of view)

The story is told ostensibly by no one.

The narrator disappears completely and the story is allowed to present itself dramatically through action and dialogue.

• telling → showing + illusion that the reader = direct and immediate witness

• no way of entering the minds of the characters;

• no evaluative comments;

• the reader is not told directly how to respond, either intellectually or emotionally, to the events or the characters

• the reader views the story from the outside → analysis and interpretation.

= we observe a film or a stage play.

Appeals to many modern and contemporary writers (impersonal and objective way it presents experience and the vivid sense of the actual)

E.g. The dramatic mode dominates Hemingway's short stories and novels where it is used to illustrate and reinforce the Hemingway "code", with its emphasis on psychological and emotional detachment and self-control.

The following passage of dramatic narration occurs at the beginning of Hemingway's short story Hills Like White Elephants:

The Hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

"What should we drink?" the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

"It's pretty hot," the man said.

"Let's drink beer."

"Dos cervezas," the man said into the curtain.

"Big ones?" a woman asked from the doorway.

"Yes. Two big ones."

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

"They look like white elephants," she said.

"I've never seen one," the man drank his beer.

"No, you wouldn't have."

- From Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway [1927]

Reliable and Unreliable Narrators

Omniscient point of view - no trouble (narrator placed outside the work and aids directly in its analysis and interpretation) = dramatic point of view (no apparent narrator present).

When the narrative voice is positioned inside the work and belongs to a character who is directly involved in the action - reliability ?.

Reliability ≠ reader agrees with the narrator's views or opinions.

Reliability = unreliable narrator can distort our understanding of the author's own intention, attitudes, and meaning.

Unreliable narrator can be a stylistic device → to make an obvious thematic point; the author usually provides a clear indication of the narrator's unreliability to avoid ambiguity if not downright unintelligibility.

E.g.: In Richard Wright's The Man Who Was Almost a Man, Dave's equation of a gun with manliness underscores the false and corrupting values of the society in which he lives.

Sincerity and good intentions ≠ reliability is another.

Narrators - unreliable ← ambiguity or irony

↑

- ignorant or commit an error in judgment by drawing the wrong conclusions

- victims of their own self-deception

To overcome this problem: