Senior English Critical Writing Handbook - Selwyn House School

symbols, poetic description, allusions, and rhetorical devices (puns, balanced sentences,aphorisms, epigrams, oxymorons, paradoxes, and so forth).DialogueIn modern novels, the tendency is to convey much of the important action through dialogue; butin novels from all ages, both dialogue and narration convey action. The task of this section isfirst to estimate the importance of the dialogue by stating how much action the author conveys indialogue and how much by narration and second to justify describing the dialogue as mechanical(merely “cranked” out to fill up space rather than to match reality) if it carries little of the action,or as realistic if it carries much of the action. The development of the section must includequotation; it is best to quote one whole exchange of, say, ten to twelve lines.ToneClosely related to point of view is the writer’s predominant mood or attitude toward his subject,the audience, or himself, which we call the tone of the book. The writer’s tone is often conveyedthrough his narrator and suggest the emotional colouring or emotional meaning of a work. As aconclusion to his essay on style, the student should attempt to identify the tone and to suggestwhat general effect the tone exerts over the average reader. The tone results from the intendedgenre (literary kind—tragedy, romance, elegy, and so forth), and it thus points to the centralpurpose of the work and relates style to theme.POINT OF VIEWThe narrator’s relation to his fictional world and to the minds of his characters we represent byanalogy: the narrator stands at a certain point from which he views events and characters.Because the point of view of the narrator largely determines the reader’s perception of events,the student must first identify the narrator’s point of view and second suggest what effect theadoption of that point of view has on the whole work of fiction. The various possibilities reduceto the four summarized in the following diagram:First Person Limited Omniscient Omniscient Objective(Third Person Limited) (Unlimited) (Dramatic)First PersonThird Person Limited34