Voice

Authorial Voice

Mansfield's "Bliss"

ALTHOUGH Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at--nothing--nothing, simply.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss–absolute bliss!–as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? . . .

Oh, is there no way you can express it without being "drunk and disorderly" ? How

idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if yo

rare, rare fiddle?

• the author's style
• quality of uniqueness
• conveys author's attitude & personality

McCarthy's "The Road"

Example:

Dickens "A Christmas Tale"

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Tools of Voice

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including—which is a bold word—the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven-years' dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley's face.

• tone
• word choice
• content/interest
• even punctuation

Examples:

Beat writers (i.e. Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Burroughs, etc.) - were interested in the effects of drugs on the mind. Many of their characters describe their experience while on drugs.

Norman Rush is highly interested in the expat experience in Botswana. And also spies.

Andrea Barrett is highly interested in science and scientific investigation/exploration.

John Updike is interested in the Jewish-American experience.

Ta Nehisi Coates is interested in the black American experience.

Voice

Analysis of

Dickens' Voice

• Conversational tone: Dickens talks to the reader as if the reader could respond ("let any man explain to me...")
• practical and even a little humorous in his description.
• characteristically wordy

Analysis

of Heep's Voice

Heep's word choice [humble]

Dialect of uneducated "umble" instead of "humble"

Structure of speech

• Emphasizes unambitious life
• Reveals actions as ambitious scheme

From this bit of his voice, we learn that Uriah is not only very ambitious, but that he is also calculating about his ambition, wary how others respsond to ambitious people. So he has developed a duplicitous personality, designed to disarm--and fool--those around him.

Dickens' character

Uriah from "David Copperfield"

"'When I was quite a young boy,' said Uriah, 'I got to know what [h]umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate [h]umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the [h]umble point of my learning, and says I, "Hard hard!" When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. "People like to be above you," says father, "keep yourself down." I am very [h]umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I've got a little power!'"

"eating humble pie" = English idiom, to admit one was wrong

• Use voice to differentiate one character from another
• demonstrate character perspective
• demonstrate character personality (i.e. authoritative, pompous, funny, chatty, warm, or a combination of different qualities to make up a single complex personality).
• Each character should have their own unique "voice" that is believable, appropriate, and consistent.

Character