Voices

If you ask me, Miss Brill (from the short story by Katherine Mansfield) needs some more worthwhile pursuits in her life.  She seems unfulfilled.  And she covers up the holes in her life by people watching.  She flip flops between judging others condescendingly and imagining herself a cared-for participant in their glamorous lives.

We know this, in part, because Mansfield chose to write Miss Brill from a third person point of view.  This means that just like Miss Brill herself, we may struggle to determine whether "she" and "they" refer to Miss Brill or only refer those around her.  With the story written from this point of view, Miss Brill can lose herself in the "performance" just as she always desired.

Which made me take a closer look at voices in all the stories we read.  Imagine, for example if Miss Brill had been the nosy narrator of O'Brien's The Things They Carried.  Or if the maternal narrator of Kincaid's Girl wrote instructions to her daughter on how to date a brownboy, blackboy, whiteboy, or halfie.  (My own mother sent me these instructions this week, by the way.)  The whole purpose of the stories would change completely!

If writers weren't so conscious of who is speaking and why, I suppose all of literature would sound something like this: