Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Stone Diaries
Narrative Voice in the Stone Diaries
The Stone Diaries is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, who through the course of the novel is both struggling and seeking to find a sense of contentment in her life, despite never having truly understood what her life's purpose is supposed to be. The novel also presents its reader with a challenging narrative puzzle to unfold: the extraordinary violations of storytelling conventions including rapid shifts between first and third person narration, but also a first-person narrator who both recounts details of her birth to which she could not realistically have access (Weese, 2006, pp. 90). These shifts and changes give the book a much more meaningful look into a character who is essentially just trying to find meaning herself.
So much can be gleaned, for instance, in viewing the following passage from the text itself: "You might like to believe that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her life as well as inside" (Shields, 1993, pp. 123). In this small passage, readers are ale to understand the presence of both...
The focalized voice, which can enter the minds, hearts, and souls of its character, is often present on many emotional levels and seeks to establish any distance or nearness to that level. This voice is used to articulate thoughts in a way that a character would not, imitating a character's thoughts directly in a way that allows an outside voice to establish a number of relations with the character from judgmental irony to empathy.
In the case of The Stone Diaries, this focalized voice is present with an alarming sense of empathy. This voice is Daisy and it is not at the same time. In the passage at hand, the focalized voice has the ability to look down upon Daisy in an observant way, understanding her present situation as well as all she is mentally and emotionally capable of doing. This voice has the ability to enter into Daisy's character from the inside-out, reaching her innermost thoughts and desires -- the things Daisy knows she can do but would never express vocally to the outside world. This voice understands all that Daisy has endured and understands what is left to endure for her to…
Works Cited
Shields, C. (1993). "The Stone Diaries." New York, NY: Penguin Books. Print.
Weese, K. (2006). "The invisible woman: narrative strategies in The Stone Diaries."
Journal of Narrative Theory, 36(1): pp. 90-120. Web. Retrieved from: JSTOR
Database. [Accessed on 4 December 2012].
Stone Diaries In the novel The Stone Diaries by author Carol Shields, a young woman deals with the pressures of being expected to conform to gender binaries in western civilization. The theme of the story is shown early in the text when Shields writes, "Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to
Today my father and I did go to a funeral of an old woman. But it was not a sad day, for she was old and the death was expected. Together we passed over the ford, the in-between place where the dead and living meet, a place that is neither wet nor dry, and we held a flask from the water of a ford in our hands. Oh, although it
Miami was where it all happened. I dated then. I guess you could say I had a life. Back then, if I were to be living under any rock, it had to be a very beautiful one, such as limestone, the kind of limestone that grew in small crevices on the road leading up to my grandfather's home on the island. I felt then that Prince Charming would come, eventually
Obasan, Oppression, & Remembrance Children whose parents survived the Holocaust often report that their parents spent their entire lives attempting to conceal the fact that they were persecuted, had narrow escapes, and -- for many survivors -- were interred in concentration camps. The desire to protect their children from the horrors they experienced is certainly one of the reasons that survivors give for their silence. But their silence also enables them
[footnoteRef:32] This lack of forces for other Pacific struggles generally weakened the Japanese war effort, as the Japanese were forced to fight those battles with insufficient men, weapons, ammunition and other related materiel. [27: Eric Hammel. Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea: The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13-15, 1942. Pacifica, CA: Pacifica Military History, 1999, p. 346.] [28: Colin G. Jameson. "Battle of Guadalcanal: 11-15 November, 1942." www.history.navy.mil Web site. 1944.
Oh now, there was no social life after work. We had work at home to do. I had a husband and two boys to feed. The housecleaning was my job too. My mom was very sick and she moved in with us in Massachusetts. We had a rough go of it, but we made it. Question. What did they pay you at the munitions factory? Aunt Etta. I think we got