Open Car
Uploaded by Aicirt on Jan 29, 2002
Stories can be written in one of several points of view, first person being one of them. The first person narrative point of view is tainted and deceiving. Some main dilemmas with regards to first person are that: emphasis is not put on some critical points, the narrator misrepresents information, and does not put information in a concise and logical order. There are many problems with first person, the aforementioned are just a few that are noticeable.
Sometimes the reader and narrator have conflicting views on important issues. Issues such as racism and discrimination can be ignored due to the narrators beliefs and culture. For example “There was a young black man sitting in front of us…from the Caribbean…One of the guards began asking the man a series of questions…Get your bags and you identification, the guard told the man, and see immigration in the open car”#. The young Caribbean man was searched and questioned unlike king and his wife. The authors views can also cause the author to over loo unimportant or in significant issues. As seen in another point in the story, the apples were more important than the discrimination shown towards the East Indian couple: “And when they got to an East Indian couple, they stopped…The East Indian told the border guard that he and his wife were Canadian citizens…Get all your bags and identification, the guard said, and take them to immigration in the open car”#. In first person the narrator controls when and what are the key parts of the story and uses, their own values as a basis for emphasis.
Some of the story tellers views are over emphasised and are incorrect. It is easy for the writer to confuse people, places and things. In the story there was a confusion between apples and oranges. The narrator can forget exactly how events occurred. There was another confusion in the story when it came to cars: “The Plymouth was a hard top, she said. The Pontiac was a convertible. And the Plymouth hadn‘t run out of gas, it had been a problem with the alternator. John Varris fixed that, she told me, not Mr. Santucci”#. The story maybe based on a false truth that the author is passing off as fact.
An easy way to tell the difference between fact or fiction is the manner in which the story is presented. First person can become confusing when the...