Diverse Magnitudes of Emotive Content - Essay Example

Diverse Magnitudes of Emotive Content One salient aspect of perspective as a literary device is that it allows the writer to calibrate and control the effusion of emotive content in a work of fiction, thereby endowing each specific work with a distinct flavour, intensity of sensory stimulation and the consequent thematic interpretation. In that context, in the three short stories that are Cathedral, The Story of an Hour and Hills like White Elephants, each specific writer astutely affiliates to a unique perspective stance to tap on the intensity and levels of emotive element, so as to influence the vantage point from which the story is felt, experienced and interpreted by the readers.

In Cathedral, Raymond Carver chooses a peculiar blend of the first person point of view to accentuate the emotional vacuity and insipidness enveloping the narrator. The first person narrator in the story elaborates on the life, actions and sentiments of the other characters in the story, presenting them as bland situational observations, without evincing the capacity to catch their real significance and depth. The narrator even blurts out his own emotional reactions to facts and situations in a tone marked by emotional isolation and bareness.

For instance, he time and again refers to Robert as “the blind man”, thereby depriving him of any attendant human significance or relevance. For that matter he totally trivializes and dehumanizes her wife’s first husband by saying, “Her Officer- why should he have a name?” This particular perspective allows the writer to highlight the narrator’s crudeness and his incapacity for imbuing relationships with a commensurate emotional understanding, thereby preparing the readers to grasp and relate to and understand his utter sense of serendipity and his eventual opening up to a world of emotional sensitivity.

In The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin’s objective is to make the readers grasp the unexpected and unpremeditated awakening of a visibly happy woman to the emotional and social repression that defined her relationship with her presumably dead husband. Thereby, Chopin masterfully exploits the third person limited perspective in the story to present all the events, actions and situations immanent in the plot in correlation to the emotions, feelings and insights of the female protagonist.

Throughout the story, the narrator limits oneself to what is heard, felt and realized by Mrs. Mallard, restraining oneself from assigning any direct emotional meaning or interpretation to the actions and feelings of the protagonist. The narrator paints the setting and elements in the story as the instruments of the emotional unclasping going on within the protagonist as he says, “She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life.

The delicious breath of rain was in the air.” The consequent outcome of this specific approach towards perspective is that it allows the readers to understand and empathize with the element of suddenness, mystery and surprise marking the protagonist’s awakening and self realization, which is the eventual theme of the story. In Hills like White Elephants, Hemingway adroitly resorts to the ‘fly on the wall’, objective point of view to bring out the tension, friction and emotional predation underlying the relationship between the two main characters.

The story is unravelled by the narrator through simple and matter of fact dialogues like “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy”, without tagging anything superfluous to them that may convey any specific emotion or sentiment. The amazing thing is that the paucity of detail and emotion marking such perspective does enable the readers to right away zero down on the seething emotional vulnerability and alienation marring the girl in the story, without being distracted by any unnecessary verbosity or explanations.

Hence, an analysis of the way the writers selected and managed the technique of perspective in the above mentioned three stories does help the readers appreciate the fact that a deft selection and usage of the perspective does empower the writers to build, influence and shape the emotional environment in a work of fiction, which goes a long way in determining as to how the readers perceive and interpret a work of fiction.