Exercise 1
First person narrator
(Man’s POV).
I pushed the cart and we both carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things in case we had to abandon the cart and make a run for it.
Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that I used to watch the road behind us. I shifted the pack higher on my shoulders and I looked over the wasted country….
…. Are you okay? I said. The boy nodded. We set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light…
Second person narrator
(Boy’s POV)
You pushed the cart and we both carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things in case we had to abandon the cart and make a run for it.
… Are you okay? You said. I nodded. We set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light…
—->If McCarthy had chosen the third person limited point of view think about the difference between telling this story from the boy’s POV or the man’s.
—-> What impact changing the narrative angle have on a story? Why do you think McCarthy decided to use an omniscient narrator?
Having an omniscient narrator the story is more complete: going through the study above, we see that by changing the character’s point of view we can definitely spot that the whole narrative is becoming weaker shorter and incomplete. What we call “hook” questions are a lot less which they provide less answers.
It is also not as engaging and it becomes restricted. Our heroes interact and by having a viewer to tell their story in a cinematic point of view, observing everything from a viewers perspective, we have a very strong and complete view of what is going, are getting engaged and we want to know what is going to happen next.
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