• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.141-156
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• 2011

This study purposes to explore the narrative of fictional events complicated by a specific narrator, taking notice of his/her role as an internal focalizer as well as an external participant. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the story of an eccentric spinster, Emily Grierson, is focalized and narrated by a townsperson, apparently an individual, but one who always speaks as 'we.' This tale-teller, as a first-hand witness of the events in the story, details the strange circumstances of Emily's life and her odd relationships with her father, her lover, the community, and even the horrible secret hidden to the climactic moment at the end. The narrative 'we' has surely watched Emily for many years with a considerable interest but also with a respectful distance. Being left unidentified on purpose, this narrative agent, in spite of his/her vagueness, definitely knows more than others do and acts undoubtedly as a pivotal role in this tale of grotesque love. Seamlessly juxtaposing the present and the past, the collective 'we' suggests an important subject that the distinction between the past and the present is blurred out for Emily, for whom the indiscernibleness of time flow proves to be her hamartia. The focalizer-narrator describes Miss Emily in the same manner as he/she describes the South whose old ways have passed on by time. Like the Old South, Emily is desperately trapped in the past, since she has not been able to adjust to the changes brought on by time. In the end, the tragic story of Emily Grierson which takes place in Jefferson plainly seems to serve as an introduction to mature Faulkner.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.693-718
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• 2009

Kate Burns, a disillusioned Irish woman in Quetzalcoatl, has alternating feelings of fear, repulsion, oppression, compassion, and fascination vis-à-vis Mexican people. Together, these feelings are constitutive of a psychic process in which an imaginary appropriation of the other takes place. In this process white subjectivity represents or reconstructs the dark race precisely as its other. At the same time, Kate's feelings register her anxious recognition of the resistant, unappropriated being of the dark people: their true 'otherness,' or what Žižek calls "the excess of existence over representation." The otherness, frequently racial and sexual, evokes mixed feelings in the white subject. Kate's at once amorous and aggressive response to Ramón's body provides a case in point. Kate's emotional undulation is considerably mitigated in The Plumed Serpent, the revised version of the novel in which the theme of 'blood-mixing' is pushed to the ultimate point. Yet the interracial marriage resolves neither the racial nor the ontologico-sexual issues raised in the first version. Kate is still attracted to Ramón in his sagacious sensuality but goes on to get married to Cipriano, a pure Indian, only to find his mechanical masculinity ever unpalatable. This shows, not just Lawrence's wilful commitment to the 'blood-mixing' theme, but perhaps his lingering taboo against miscegenation as well. Changes in the plot entail those in the narrative voice. In Quetzalcoatl, Owen, a spectatorial and gossipy character, frequently competes for narration with the fully participant third-person narrator. In The Plumed Serpent, the third-person narrator becomes predominant, now attempting with greater confidence to present the reality of the racial other immediately to European readership. While such immediacy is illusional, narrative insistence on it implies a struggle to displace racial stereotypes and offer an experiential understanding of the other.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.7-32
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• 2011

In this article, we tried to introduce a little-known work of M.A. Bulgakov "Snowstorm" and provide some various clues for reading this short story. This study is focused on "snowstorm-plot", grasping the structure and the theme of the present work. To this end, in the Chapter II we tired to seek for the meanings of Bulgakov's "snowstorm" based on intertextuality shown from the works by those writers such as Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. In this short story "snowstorm" is presented not only as a natural phenomenon but as a "participant" which provides young doctor-narrator with short time break and let him go to a dying bride, and at last place him on the crossroads of life and death. Indeed "snowstorm" plays a role of the framed structure of Bulgakov's text. In the Chapter III we observed the creative expression of Bulgakov's work which is comprised of overlappings with dream and reality. In other words, in the short story "Snowstorm" the outside and the inside story of frame are described as a dream of the one same night. We can guess that the Shermetievo story is a kind of dream of young doctor who fell asleep in Tuesday night, asking himself "how many patients will come tomorrow?". By the way the Shermetievo story unfolds as an incident which is happened on Wednesday. In this way in Bulgakov's "Snowstorm" it is hard to draw clear lines of demarcation between dream and reality. Therefore existential themes like these "Life and Death", "Professional calling and personal conscience", "The great nature and the week human being" are resonated with original structure "Dream in Dream".