I'm excited to be beginning a new tradition here on the blog: Technique Tuesdays. I'll be posting abbreviated versions of my critical essay work at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Check back for weekly updates and feel free to reflect on how you might apply these techniques in your own writing in a comment.
Hearing Voices: A Good Thing?
In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, author Sherman Alexie begins with three chapters of back story dump. His narrator, Junior, tells us how he ended up unattractive, poor, and best friends with someone who enjoys beating others up. So why was I still reading?
Voice. Though Junior tells instead of shows, he does so through one-liners such as “there is nothing better than a [Kentucky Fried Chicken] leg when you haven't eaten for (approximately) eighteen-and-a-half hours” (Alexie 8). He goes on to explain that the worst thing about poverty isn't hunger and describes how he had to carry his sick dog outside to his waiting father: “A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that” (Alexie 14). Junior's voice is a compelling mix of both the hilarious and tragic.
Creating a compelling voice for one character is a challenge on its own, but what about works with multiple points of view? When I first read Rita Garcia-Williams's Jumped, the story of a girl fight told through three voices, I found two of the voices stood out distinctly because they were linked to personal passions.
So why was the voice of the third girl, Leticia, so hard to distinguish? She does have a passion for her cell phone and even names it: “I keep Celina on vibrate, stashed in my bag” (Williams-Garcia 23). Was her voice simply not as well connected to her passion? Or was her less distinctive voice done on purpose?
Leticia's lack of voice sets up her position as a passive viewer. She sees life like she's watching TV. Even when she reflects back on a time when she walked in on a teacher having a medical emergency, she describes the incident as “like watching a reality-TV show” (Williams-Garcia 141).
And I'm like, wow, I finally know real people on television. And to think, I was there when it all went down. I could have been on that news program being interviewed. I knew all about it from start to finish. I just look at the TV and I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. (Williams-Garcia 167-168).
Sometimes hearing voices is a good thing. Maybe sometimes, it's better not to hear a voice.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007. Print.
Williams-Garcia, Rita. Jumped. New York: HarperTeen, 2009. Print.
Great post--I'll need to come back to take notes.