Book Analysis: Babylon Revisited
BABYLON REVISITED
POINT OF VIEW
In theory, point of view reveals a perspective from which the narrator tells the story. Analyzing a story’s point of view will provide us with answers to two questions ‘by whom’ and ‘how’ the story is told. By the way, we can also understand attitude of the writer towards his characters as well.
In the case of ‘Babylon Revisited’, the one who tells us this story is a third-person narrator. To be more specific, he is a limited omniscient narrator.
Firstly we notice that the narrator addresses the protagonist by name ‘Charlie’ or the third person ‘he’, and also does the same with other characters. This suggests that he stands somewhere beside the story, witnessing it without participating in it, and then retells us what happended- that is why the narrator is called a ‘third-person’. From the objective point of view of a third person narrator, the story appears to be more all-round and reliable.
On the other hand, the narrator in this story is omniscient. Firstly it is because he can read mind of characters. He leads us into Charlie’s thoughts to have a look at his absolutely different life one year and a half ago and also his nostalgia of it; or to see his loss when finding the Ritz bar gloomy and quiet.
“Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l'Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano's Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval's. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.
As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, "I spoiled this city for myself. I
POINT OF VIEW
In theory, point of view reveals a perspective from which the narrator tells the story. Analyzing a story’s point of view will provide us with answers to two questions ‘by whom’ and ‘how’ the story is told. By the way, we can also understand attitude of the writer towards his characters as well.
In the case of ‘Babylon Revisited’, the one who tells us this story is a third-person narrator. To be more specific, he is a limited omniscient narrator.
Firstly we notice that the narrator addresses the protagonist by name ‘Charlie’ or the third person ‘he’, and also does the same with other characters. This suggests that he stands somewhere beside the story, witnessing it without participating in it, and then retells us what happended- that is why the narrator is called a ‘third-person’. From the objective point of view of a third person narrator, the story appears to be more all-round and reliable.
On the other hand, the narrator in this story is omniscient. Firstly it is because he can read mind of characters. He leads us into Charlie’s thoughts to have a look at his absolutely different life one year and a half ago and also his nostalgia of it; or to see his loss when finding the Ritz bar gloomy and quiet.
“Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l'Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano's Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval's. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.
As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, "I spoiled this city for myself. I