THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2008
Week XIII
Portraits of Gabriel García Márquez and Margaret Atwood (Atwood by Christian Cardell Corbet)Use this week's entry to tie together this week's discussions by comparing and contrasting Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Your post should follow one of the following prompts:
Narrative style. How do both authors roll out the plot in terms of chronology? From whose perspective and what narrative point of view is the novel told? Are they a reliable narrator? Why do these authors choose to use this style?
Setting. How does each novel's setting affect the reader's understanding of the way the characters respond to their setting? Does the identity formation of the narrators reflect their given setting - in terms of space, environment, cultural context, peers, etc.?
National/Regional Background. How does each novel reflect the national/regional background of the author? How does The Handmaid's Tale reflect the victimhood/survivalist theme Atwood describes as a major feature of Canadian literature? How does Chronicle of a Death Foretoldreflect elements of magical realism? Do the novels reflect their larger cultural literary context in the same way?
Concerning the narrative style of both novels, it’s firstly evident that the chronology of events within both plots is not organized in terms of date. Rather, both seem to be more centered around the thought process of the protagonists instead. Whenever the protagonist remembers a certain instance in his or her life, so the plot of the book reverts back to that time, instead of just keeping us in the present and giving just a short summary of the characters memory. This shows a modernistic background with each of the authors, concerning the use of “stream of consciousness” in a sense, where instead of giving us the reader a straightforward progression of events, we are instead given, so as to make it truly seem as if we’re reading through the protagonist’s perspectives, a varied series of memories and internal thoughts mixed with the present happenings. The narrators of both novels are told first person by each respective protagonist as well, and throughout the progression of each plot, we find that each narrator in turn is end up being not entirely reliable. This shows the similarity of these two authors and the two works by again giving a very accurate representation of the types of literary thought processes that both of these authors seem to have been influenced by. The fact that both of the narrators are portrayed as unreliable to us seems that we are being told that truth is subjective, and that even though we are given the world through the eyes of the protagonist, it doesn't necessarily make everything right or correct, and which again distribute the modernist characteristic within both of these works.
