Word: first-person
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...walks just as they have done for years. Swapping bed as often as bridge-partners, the bonds and tensions webbing these people together is wonderfully conveyed the prejudices and biases that the characters display in their attitudes both towards each other and towards Ireland are threaded subtly beneath the first-person narration of one of the wives. Theirs is an unambitious rural retreat in which "it was impossible to believe that somewhere else the unpleasantness was going on." The troubles of Ireland are at a safe distance until one of their own number. Cynthia (whose husband the narrator sleeps with...
Rushdie has clearly read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera. Extravagant mythmaking alternates with passages of first-person political candor ("May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic revival?"). But his literary accomplishments are uniquely his own. A Westerner by adoption and choice, looking back on a country where he would assuredly be silenced if he tried to write a book like Shame, Rushdie has produced an imaginative tour of obliquities and iniquities. - By Paul Gray
...students in a junior English class are discussing a George Eliot novel, which they have read in the three days between orientation day and the start of school. Five students are debating with the teacher about the time frame of the novel, as well as the use of first-person narrative. Near by, a class of sophomores listens intently as the teacher fires off volleys of French. Not a word of English is spoken. The same spirit of curiosity and dedication seems to flow through other rooms at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, where students from the ghetto mingle...
...first-person pronoun I is a basic starting point: ego, je, ich, io, ya. In Japanese, where nothing is that simple, the word has two dozen or more forms, depending on who is talking, and to whom, and the social relationship between them. An elderly man might refer to himself as washi, but his wife would say watashi, or, for that matter, atakushi, or atashi; their daughter might say atai and their son boku. Then there is temae, which means both you and I. But the Japanese often evade these social difficulties by dropping all pronouns entirely...
...objectivity at last what the public seeks from its reporters? Certainly, in matters as urgent as wars, no one wants impressionistic sketches or first-person pleas for conciliation, but it may be that pure objectivity is sought less than simple completeness, a good eye and ear for detail. People often have a hard time dealing with facts that distort their presumptions, but that is what they ask of their messengers: tell everything. The difficulty in war reporting is that no one, on any side, wants everything told. Everything includes cowardice, dishonor, the breaking of codes. He who tells everything represents...