Word: first-person
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...majority of the film is Gump's first-person recitation of his life story to strangers while he sits on a park bench. Could you see this happening in New York City? I think he would have been hauled off to Bellevue. Or in Los Angeles? Well, everyone drives there. No where else would people take the time, listen and empathize with a complete stranger. Yes, the movie also shows the rednecks who tease him, but the optimistic glaze of the film uses their hatred as a source for Forrest's strength and development...
Stokes does point out that the Chafetz book is curiously self-indulgent, written as a first-person narrative of one man's odyssey in search of the truth, whereas McNamara strikes a strong pose of journalistic objectivity, with her crisp prose and confident tone. But Stokes is correct--even if both of these books are "biased," only one of them could be said to be "croppled" by it, and that book is McNamara's. And it is croppled largely because of its posture of objectivity...
...theme is William Vollmann, whom the author finds boundlessly fascinating. He can't stay out of his own novels, and he capers in and out of them, representing himself typically as William the Blind, a very clever, very naughty historical voyeur. The first volumes of the Seven Dreams cycle are successful novels despite Vollmann's frequent first-person kibitzing. His new book, The Rifles (Viking; 411 pages; $22.95), is an exasperating hash of fiction, op-ed attitudinizing, men's magazine heroics, cut-and-paste history and confessional autobiography...
...novel, the first-person narrative unifies present and past and a multiplicity of minor incidents associated only through the consciousness of the butler. In the film, the narrator ha been removed, and only tenuous narrative coherence remains; the attempts made to integrate the various episodes into the film are sometimes rather artificial. On occasion, when a scene from the past is introduced, an image appears in the center of the screen, and gradually assumes the foreground, almost emerging from behind the prior picture; at other times, a voice-over of a letter written either from Mr. Stevens to Miss Kenton...
...There's nothing wrong with the narrative idea here, and the reader should skid amiably into the underbrush of Chapter 2, as the treasure finders turn into thieves and murderers, miring themselves in treachery. But Smith has written a story in which all the characters, not excluding the first-person narrator, are stupid, mean and boring. They are jerks, irredeemable fools, and if one sat down next to you at a bar and started talking, you would pay your tab and move on. The point is not that every crime story needs a hero -- Elmore Leonard writes brilliantly and almost...