Talk to Me (First Person Point of View)

“I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counselors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business…As the circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character, I cannot refrain from relating them.”

-p 31

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein employs a fairly unique version of the first person point of view. A great portion of this uniqueness rests in the interesting structure of the novel, which starts in the form of a series of letters and then continues as a frame story told by Victor Frankenstein. Though the letters and the frame story are told by different narrators, however, the style of point of view is actually the same in both structures. Robert Walton, the writer of the initial letters, writes to his sister with complete knowledge of who his audience is. Because of this, he often writes with an extremely relaxed, conversational tone. He even goes so far as to directly talk to the audience at times. In a similar way, the structure of the frame story allows Frankenstein to speak directly with Walton. He often poses rhetorical questions to Walton and even comments to him about the way in which he is telling his story. In writing in this way, Shelley creates a uniquely personal and intimate relationship with her readers. Few authors acknowledge their audience for fear that it will detract from the work, yet Shelley devises a way to use this style to her advantage.

Modern Sophocles

Well, Nadine Gordimer's "Once upon a Time" has a rather grisly ending, doesn't it? Unfortunately, you can almost see the ending coming. The narrator sets up her theme in the initial story by reflecting that it was the stress and paranoia that actually kept her awake at night, not any real threat. She was stuck in "an epicenter of stress" that entrapped her within a constant state of fear and paranoia of danger. The frame story which then follows this reflection is therefore told with an ubiquitous sense of dread and doom. As the man and woman continue to build up their defenses and safety measures in order to keep danger out and, more importantly, their paranoia away, you start to get a feeling that something disastrous will result anyway, either in spite of these precautions or maybe even because of these precautions. The audience can do nothing but read on as the couple continues to add on more and more security measures, while the boy innocently is "fascinated by the device[s]" and uses them to "play with his small friends."

When the final paragraph starts, and the audience reads as the boy pretends "to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns," the sense of dread escalates. Almost before the reader reads of the boy's fate, he can predict what likely will happen. It is this final paragraph depicting the boy's death (or at least near-death) which connects the frame story to the initial exterior story by revealing the situational irony in the boy's mutilation. Like the narrator in her bed, the man and woman had become so stricken with fear and paranoia that they ended up causing severe pain and suffering to themselves in attempts to avoid that same pain and suffering. Like Oedipus trying to prevent a prophecy from coming true, the man and woman's actions are what cause the thing which they dread the most.