The Old Fetal Narrative
Maybe it has something to do with the watery world that a fetus inhabits—our words taking on the summersaulting quality of an internal water ballet.
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Posts Tagged: narrators
The Rumpus Interview with Carolyn Parkhurst
Carolyn Parkhurst discusses her latest book, Harmony, writing about your personal life and family in fiction, and her fascination with cults.
...moreOmniscience Is In
In a New York Times article, Elliott Holt writes about how omniscience is making a comeback in contemporary fiction. She writes: The effects of omniscience are authority and scope; novels with such narrators seem especially confident. The characters may be uncertain, but we sense the controlling force above them. Omniscience reinforces that we are reading […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Rebecca Schiff
Rebecca Schiff discusses her debut collection The Bed That Moved, choosing narrators who share similarities with each other and with herself, and whether feminism and fiction-writing conflict.
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Boswell
Robert Boswell talks about his new novel, Tumbledown, mental illness and counseling, and writing a novel in an unreliable but omniscient voice.
...moreNot That Kind of Narrator
The problem with unreliable narrators — and the thing that makes them so delightful to read in fiction — is that by design, you never quite know when they are telling the truth. Which makes it a stunningly poor choice of conventions to employ when writing about sexual assault, a crime that victims are often […]
...moreDistancing Author and Narrator
The line between fiction and non-fiction has always been blurry, but an author’s choice of genre—be it novel, memoir, or even autobiography—results in different relationships between the reader and narrator. Writing in HTMLGIANT, Art Edwards takes a closer look at these relationships and the effects that genre choice has on the narrative. That’s where the […]
...moreUnreliable Men
The unreliable narrator lends a particular type of voice to a story. After breaking down unreliable narrators by gender, Elizabeth Weinberg concludes that there are differences between male and female unreliable narrators—primarily, that male narrators lack empathy. I’m a firm believer that although most fiction isn’t autobiographical in the sense that the events of a story […]
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