I think Greg speaks for all of you when he said that the end of the story surprised him. This story works a very particular kind of magic over the reader, lulling him or her into believeing that Paul is escaping a repressive childhood in Pittsburgh for a new and exciting future in New York. We root for Paul because he is the Romantic spirit in all of us ("a sleep and a forgetting"; who knows where that line is from); however, Cather dupes us into indulging all our childhood fantasies along with Paul until we reach the point at which we can no longer follow him.
What part does P.O.V. play in all this? I look forward to seeing what you write about it.
Happy Thinking,
Mr. B
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Well, as we discussed in class, once the POV becomes third person limited we can't really help it but be defensive of Paul because we only view life through his troubled eyes. We become emphatetic to a degree because we've all experienced teen agnst and rebellion and have viewed our lives as horrible or unbearable. It's like we said with the poetry session though, that whatever we are feeling, no matter if it's obscene compared to someone else's circumstance, it is still our experience and important to us. So Paul's experience, pain whatever you want to call it is his own so it's important to him and to us for that's all we see. But we can't see other people perception of Paul, which might have revealed the selfish and potent nature of Paul sooner.
ReplyDeleteI think that our opinions are going to change every time the story's speaker changes. Everybody sees things in a different light and when the speaker changes, and tells their version, we start to see things their way.
ReplyDelete(There is a book called 19 minutes that is a really good example of this!!)
I definitely agree with Ashley when she says Paul's experience to him is important to us because of what we see, and our opinion of him could completely change if we saw someone else's perspective.
I think Ashley nailed it. We talked about how third person limited narration automatically skews our perception of the main character's world. We feel for Paul because we are given only his side of the story. Cather "dupes" us quite easily as result. Only when we step outside the narrative and speculate on our own terms can we see Paul for what he really is. Thus, we have to look at Paul's circumstances in reality, not the way Paul tells us. Third person limited is a lot like how we tell stories about something bad happening to us. Gossip and rumors are started because we can only get one part of the story, so we sympathize with them automatically without thinking about the other persons involved. Just my two cents.
ReplyDeleteI can honestly say I was, as Greg put it, "duped" by Cather for sure. After our discussion in class, I saw that Paul's life really wasn't that bad at all. His job seemed very interesting, his dad wasn't a terrible guy, and all of his problems in school especially, seemed to be a result of his own attitude. I think Paul is a type of person who just wants more and who thinks he may deserve better or more adventure, as a romantic person may believe, and that is why his point of view is so involved with his feelings on his current situation. We begin to see Paul's situation through his eyes only and this lets us experience the situatino along with him. When the point where we cannot follow Paul arrives (his suicide), it is almost a wake up call in my opinion. It is so shocking that it causes us to maybe review the story again and think a little differently about it, I know it did for me!
ReplyDeletePaul’s “Romantic spirit” is apparent to use not only from the narrator’s indulgence in Paul’s feelings and imagination, but also for the reference to a William Wordsworth poem.
ReplyDeleteThe POV keeps the reader from being able to see Paul and his life from any other angle than how Paul sees it. We then come to empathize Paul become there is no sense of…reality I suppose. After the suicide, the reader can no longer identify with Paul as he ultimately becomes what he was trying to avoid: just a normal person.
The end of Cather’s story mirrors the last two lines of Woodworth’s poem as well. “At length the Man perceives it die away/And fade into the light of common day.” I doubt it’s a coincidence and this parallel further fuels the Romanticism that is Paul.
like greg said having third person limited narration i was definitely more empathetic to paul. it makes me put myself in his situation and i fell bad for him. of course this is what he wants us to feel. yes, we should not feel bad for this guy because he was fine, but again because of the POV we do, i do at least. i realized how bad i felt for him because of what kelly austin was saying in class. that is the kind of power that POV has and it is important to keep an open mind and think of how the other characters in the story are feeling when reading.
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