The Purpose of this Blog

Your task on this blog is to write a brief summary of what we learned in class today. Include enough detail so that someone who was ill or missed the lesson can catch up with what they missed. Over the course of the term, these 'class scribe' posts will grow to be a guide book for the course, written by students for students.

With each post ask yourself the following questions:
1) Is this good enough for our guide book?
2) Will your post enable someone who wasn't here to catch up?
3) Would a graphic/video/link help to illustrate what we have learned?


Monday 14 March 2011

How a point of view affects a novel.

We entered the classroom to find four names on the board. Nick, Tom, Daisy and Gatsby. We were then asked to identify the odd one out. The majority of people decided that Gatsby was the odd one out due to the fact that he seemed to represent Romanticism with an element of mystery that the other characters did not have; however some people decided that Daisy was the odd one out as she did not seem to fit either modernism or Romanticism and seemed to be a character that was trapped and lost her voice.

We then did an exercise that allowed Mr Sadgrove to see if we had read the chapters which he had asked us to do by making us write two newspaper headlines, one for chapter one and another for chapter two.
After this we were shown a quote by David Lodge from his "The art of Fiction":
"The choice of the point of view from the story is told... fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions.

In order to put this concept into use, we were asked to take the classic nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" and change the narrative to first person. An example of this would be similar to what I wrote:
I was just chilling on a wall,
Thinking, why do I have arms?
Anyway, this hen comes up to me and says
"You belong to me"

So, basically, I thought screw this and took a leap of faith off the wall.
Obviously, my faith was misplaced and I died.
But it's all good because they turned me into an omelet.

Finally, we made a table to show the advantages and disadvantages of using a first person narrator.
Such as an advantage being that we can experience what the narrator is feeling and a disadvantage is that there will be gaps and missing information due to an unreliable narrator.

Homework:
Comment on Blog.
Revised Aa question on Godiva focusing on narrative notes.
Self asses the Aa question using the sheet.
Read Chapter three again.

Roman A.

PS. Sorry for late blog but don't use this as an excuse to not do the homework you still have all day today!

16 comments:

  1. We also described how Tom seems to be a physical character within the novel however daisy and Jordon seem to be more "floating" and carefree

    Chris. 张

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  2. Before this lesson I just imagined all the characters to be linked but when we began to break them down it seems very weird and amazing to see how we can approach each character.

    Aisha

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  3. I think that Gatsby is an old soul, a romantic trapped in the new, industrialised world. Therefore he seems to be an outcast, as Tom, Daisy and Nick all belong to that society.

    Aleksandra

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  4. I thought the Humpty Dumpty bit was good, because it allowed us to change something that appears so simple.

    And where it says 'revised aa question on Godiva focusing on narrative notes', what's the question???

    Daniel.

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  5. Daniel, It's the question you should have already done on Godiva.

    Roman.

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  6. Going over the chapters and seeing how nick interwines modernism and romanticism and exploring his character really helped me understand the narrative of the book

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  7. Sorry fitzgerald interwines not nick

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  8. Love your version of Humpty Dumpty Roman :P

    Daisy character seems one of complexity, as when she states “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Shows that she feels that women aren't excepted as intellects, and maybe that is why she acts the way she does.

    Esmeralda ;)

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  9. "How does Tennyson tell the story in Godiva?"

    Cheers.
    Daniel.

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  10. There is something about Gatsby which I can't quite figure out. His introduction to the novel through his `gazing up at the night sky` seems to be a personal thought of foreshadowing.

    Chris W

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  11. the point of view effects greatly, the way we percieve the novel, i think we only have to look at enduring love, in chapter 9, the narration changes to an omnecient narrator, but all of a sudden it appears as though we are reading a different story.

    yahaya kiyingi

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  12. The way Nick ends chapter 3 by informing "I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." reinforces the disadvantage of a first person narrator as "there will be gaps and missing information".
    Furthermore the reader acknowledges that Nick is a mysterious figure as a sense of hypocrisy develops within Nick's character as his honest dishonesty clashes with the description he gave off himself on the first page

    Thank you Roman for this excellent, concise, LATE account of what happened in our last lesson.

    'Sonny.

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  13. I think Nick was an interesting way to narrate the story because it is basically having the third person omniscent narrator within the story itself and not outside which isn`t a type of narrative i`ve encountered before. I said Nick was the odd one out for this reason as he is the person who tells the story.
    Tamsin (sorry for any spelling mistakes)

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  14. Good blog Roman.... About having Nick as the narrator I think that the readers get a very judgemental view of the other characters in the novel.... And the way in which Nick describes Gatsby in Chapter-1 I personally find it a bit wierd when read....:)
    Akanksha.

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  15. Great account of Humpty Dumpty dude~ he got fried in my one!

    Back to buisness though, I seriously dislike how one dimensional the way that the narration is going to be~ its reductionist of Fitzgerald to only include the obviously biased viewpoint of one character, it locks the others out and restricts their voice. I can only hope that this is expanded upon..

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  16. I believe Gatspy is the odd one out from Daist and Tom. We dont really no much about him as for the end of chapter one he disappear into the shadows. As we meet Tom and Daisy we know about their personalities but Gatspy he has a mysterious persona. I believe he has so many secrets to hide.

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