I was just thinking about narrators in books because of something I'm reading for my fiction class. It's actually a subject that I think about pretty often when reading stories, especially after taking Dr. Hesselink's Intro to Lit Studies class when everything we read was analyzed for narrator before it was analyzed for anything else. I was thinking about those books in which the narrator speaks directly to the readers, as in Victor Hugo and A Series of Unfortunate Events (as a parody of Victorian children's books). Now I remember having a conversation awhile ago with some friends who really disliked this kind of narrator. I've always liked it when authors do this. It makes me feel more a part of the story. Does it cause too much separation between author and character? Oh, and I just remembered, L. M. Montgomery does this a lot in her Emily books. She's always saying, "I am not Emily's apologist, I am merely her biographer" in that very Victorian way of hers. It's interesting how the role of the narrator, the duty of the narrator, has evolved in literature. In Victorian and early twentieth century children's literature (like What Katy Did, oh boy) the narrator seems to be striving to teach (and Lemony Snicket does a beautiful parody of this in his Series of Unfortunate Events) but in contemporary children's literature the author seems to be trying to inhabit the child's world and trying to get on to the child's level. It seems to me that there are a lot more books written from the first person child's perspective. I think this is rather more pretentious than the narrator speaking directly to the reader, but I guess all of this leads me to the separation between author and narrator and that's something I'm not prepared to deal with right now.
Today I saw In America. I've wanted to see it for awhile just because I loved the preview. I got in the theatre and began to feel a bit unsure about dragging my friends in to watch this with me, since all I was really going on was the preview, but it was amazing. It could be classified as heartwarming, but it doesn't take the usual shortcuts of heartwarming movies. And I normally don't like children in movies because they're forced into being children and aren't allowed to be people, but the two little girls in In America are allowed to grow and change and be as human as the rest of this magnificent cast. The movie's about an Irish family who emigrate to New York City.
The family in the movie has two daughters and the story is mostly told from the older daughter's perspective. She's ten when the movie starts and her observations on America really reminded me a lot of my thoughts when I moved back to American when I was about seven. I remember discovering things like "humidity" and learning the Star Spangled Banner when the whole idea seemed foreign. What really reminded me of myself in the film, though, was when the younger girl, Ariel, said that something was "cool" and the older girl said, "she sounds American already, it's disgusting." This disdain for America is something that I've had a hard time getting rid of over the years. It seems so hard to be loyal to something so big. There are times when I feel happy being American, but most of the time I just don't feel American. I don't feel like I'm from anywhere else, not anymore, but I don't really identify myself with this country. It was nice to see a movie with the outsider perspective, and especially from the young girl outsider perspective. It made me feel not quite so alien.