Some Narratological Moves and Their Effect in End of Alice

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8 word format

document in English

literature

term papers

published 07/08/2007

review : Completed

level : Advanced

requested 2 times

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Summary

Let it be known that in End of Alice there is no ANP, only an ENP, and the ENP is the time during which Chappy is imprisoned. The “prison” time moves forward steadily and occasionally will jump backward in an analepsis to, roughly, two points in the narrator’s past. The first analeptic point is that of Chappy as a young boy. The second analeptic point is that of Chappy preprison, at about 30 years old. Both of these times move slightly forward in themselves. The ENP “prison” time does not seem to cast backward homodiegetically—that is, we never are taken into a scene in which Chappy is a prison newcomer. He does describe such a time, but we are never taken there narratively.

We begin on the first page with advance notice that Alice will die
Chappy relates his musings about the Correspondent in what I will call heterodiegetic projections
On page 24 Chappy imagines that the Correspondent is imagining her boy might have gone away to summer camp
On page 25, lest we forget that Chappy is projecting this Correspondent subnarrative, he pops into his own imagined story
Back to camp. With the 'I' voice, which on page 25 has supplanted the third-person 'she,' Chappy has imposed himself on the Correspondent subnarrative
The language, the if-only 'woulds,' suggests that Chappy is somehow restricted; he cannot fully enter that scene
On page 33 still. We are given a snippet of the Correspondent's letter
At the top of page 35 the rest of this subnarrative is quickly summarized
On page 140 we are in the Correspondent ENP
Chappy seems to impose his pedophilic fantasies on Alice as well. This is hard to say definitively