Word: third-person
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Steinem: It's objective, third-person reporting, in which you don't put yourself in the story. It's not that one method is better than the other -- you choose the method that suits the subject. Susan's method was exactly right because it got credibility within the world it was attacking. This book reminds me of the woman detective who wired herself and won her sexual- harassment case. Those guys taught her how to wire herself, and she did, and she caught them. It's a sweet victory, to win using their methods...
...most texts (which used to be called books), narrator can also be a tricky word because the third-person voice doesn't necessarily have to be the one telling the story all the time. Speaker is a good substitute. Persona works in poems. But when there are a lot of characters, it's best to refer to everyone by name, but only if you make sure to explain how the naming of people functions in the text...
...Ostensibly he seeks to portray Frank's distance from his numerous problems. Kaplan also varies the tense from past to present. Mostly, this makes the book less readable, truncating any natural flow. Occasionally in all these switch-eroos the author gets lost. For example, in the midst of a third-person narrative, he writes, "It does seem almost toasty. The fire is crackling brightly..." Who finds the fire toasty? Frank? His wife, Jena? Although Kaplan might know, the reader certainly does...
...never out of mind. The briefers in Riyadh referred to him constantly in the anonymous yet curiously familiar third-person singular: "He's dug in along the border . . . He's taking quite a beating . . . If he heads north, we'll cut him off." As long as he was invisible, he was easy to imagine as one of half a million clones of Saddam himself, smug, defiant and murderous...
Imagine puts to good use selections from hundreds of hours of tape-recorded interviews, allowing John to "narrate" the movie himself from beyond the grave and avoiding the need for an intrusive third-person voice-over. John's honesty and wit are ever apparent...