Who's telling the story
The first thing that I noticed when I began reading IJ was the perspective from which the story was told. The entire story seemed to be taking place inside the heads of the characters. This may sound like a trivial observation, but the distinction that I am making is that I did not think that very much, if any of the story, is told from a 3rd person point of view. Therefore, there is no way to know for sure what the reality of what is occuring at any point during the story, because the story is only presented to the readers through the perceptions of the character who's head we are in. This is quite apparent in the opening section in which Hal thinks he is behaving perfectly normally and to the reader he is, except that Hal describes what the actions of the other people in the room, the Deans, were doing. Hal is almost trying to convince the reader that he is perfectly fine, but everyone else in the room perceives him to be doing, well, its not clear quite what, because we only see the event as Hal perceives it, which is him giving a speech defending his academic record (page 12).
I think that this is the manner that all of the story is told through: the world strictly as it is perceived by a single person at a time. This method of writing sheds light on why the specific syntax and varying styles of writing from chapter to chapter are used. If you were to listen in to the thought stream of the character's heads, I think it would sound exactly like it is written in IJ. The chapter about Erdedy waiting for his drug delivery shows how Erdedy looks around the room and traces his, as it seems to be written, complete thought process throughout the section. Wallace does not just pick and choose which thoughts are important towards plot development and which are not. He includes the whole train, which in many cases leads to what I find to be dull descriptions of the physical world around the character.
Each section, as the character of focus changes, is accompanied by a change in the writing style. For example, the section from pages 37-38 shows a very different grammatical structure than the other sections. My guess would be that that structure is how the thoughts really sound to that person (I'm not sure of all their names, but I believe this particular character's name is Clenette). This idea of being in the heads of the different characters makes all the stylistic changes throughout the book much more reasonable.
-Lawrence Tanzman
I think that this is the manner that all of the story is told through: the world strictly as it is perceived by a single person at a time. This method of writing sheds light on why the specific syntax and varying styles of writing from chapter to chapter are used. If you were to listen in to the thought stream of the character's heads, I think it would sound exactly like it is written in IJ. The chapter about Erdedy waiting for his drug delivery shows how Erdedy looks around the room and traces his, as it seems to be written, complete thought process throughout the section. Wallace does not just pick and choose which thoughts are important towards plot development and which are not. He includes the whole train, which in many cases leads to what I find to be dull descriptions of the physical world around the character.
Each section, as the character of focus changes, is accompanied by a change in the writing style. For example, the section from pages 37-38 shows a very different grammatical structure than the other sections. My guess would be that that structure is how the thoughts really sound to that person (I'm not sure of all their names, but I believe this particular character's name is Clenette). This idea of being in the heads of the different characters makes all the stylistic changes throughout the book much more reasonable.
-Lawrence Tanzman
posted by tanzmanl at 9:39 PM
1 Comments:
On the other hand, I *think* Hal is the only one to ever use "I" in the narration. (e.g. "It's funny what I don't recall..." pg. 10, "I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms" pg. 68)
On the other hand, Hal gets some third person treatment too: "Hal held three pairs of E.T.A. sweatpants..." pg. 32. Perhaps the difference lies in time or the perspective of the narrator? (e.g. Even if Hal IS the narrator he might refer to himself in 3rd person if he is narrating someone else's memory, for example.)
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