英语短篇小说教程电子教案-Unit2

The third-person narration:
The third-person narration is provided by a narrator outside the story. The narrator may know everything, or may have a limited vision about the story.
In other words, he may or may not present an accurate picture of events.
The Reader:
Since the narrator does not always represent the author, the reader can not take the narrator’s words for granted, but needs to weigh and decide how much he can trust the narrator’s story.
The two first-person narrators tell two stories of two washwomen who share similar tragic fates. Discuss the differences in the narrators that result in the differences in the way the two short stories are told, and the different effect achieve. (Please make reference to “Reading Tips” on page 11 and page15)
英语短篇小说教程
Short Stories in English: A Reading Course
虞建华 编写
Unit Two
The Author, the Narrator and the Reader
Reading: (1): “The Washwoman” by I.B. Singer (2): “A Piece of Yellow Soap” by Frank
The narrator of a story may be:
reliable or unreliable, objective or subjective, fair or partial, sympathetic or detached, simple-minded or sophisticated, ignorant or insightful.
The third-person narration :
The omniscient narrator is a third person narrator who knows everything. This kind of narrator can present an overview of events and characters, and can move in and out of the characters’ minds freely.
The limited omniscient narrator gives a narration that focuses only on what a single person experiences. In other words, events are limited to one person’s perspective, and nothing is revealed that the narrator does not see, hear, feel, or think about.
Sargeson
The Author
The author is not the same as the narrator – even when an author uses the first-person “I”. The author creates and chooses a narrator to tell a story and he might as well choose a totally different narrator to make a different story. A highly sophisticated author can choose a naïve person, a child for example, to tell a story.
It is a mistake to think that, for each story, there is one “correct” interpretation for all readers.
The first-person narration:
The first-person narration is provided by a narrator inside the story as the main character, or a participant, or an observer. This way of narration can present incidents more convincingly as the story is told by “I” personally. But the first-person narrator is, by definition, limited because he presents a situation as only one person sees it.
Does the piece of washing soap (in “A Piece of Yellow Soap”) have the “power” as the narrator tells us? What is the “power” that forces him to take off?
The Naïve Narrator
A naïve narrator is a story teller who does not fully understand the significance of the story he is telling, thus a special literary effect, whHale Waihona Puke Baiduch we call dramatic irony, is achieved between his limited understanding and the reader’s better understanding of the situation.
The reading process is interactive, with the reader playing the role of both a receiver and a contributor, as meaning can only be discovered and constructed by the reader.
The Narrator
Who is telling the story determines the story’s point of view – the vantage point from which events are presented. The implications of this choice are far-reaching. The perspective from which a story is told determines what details are to be included in the story and how they are to be arranged and presented.
Reading and Textual Analysis
(1): I.B. Singer “The Washwoman” (2): Frank Sargeson “A Piece of Yellow Soap”
Questions for Discussion:
In this Unit, we have two stories about two washwomen. There are a lot of similar descriptions and common characteristics in the two stories. Find and list them.