What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Roddy Doyle. Also, a glimpse into my homework.

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I'm not writing a Valentine's Day post.  If you want something Valentines-y, see "Plato in Love."

I wanted to show you something (you can click on the photo and it will enlarge):














It's called a Deep Dive, and it was my homework for my Advanced Fiction class (for those of you confused by the words in the upper right corner).  A deep dive is an analysis of a text, in this case the short story Blood by Roddy Doyle, from a writer's standpoint, using annotations.  We are reading an anthology of short stories in my Fiction class and were allowed to choose whichever story we wanted for this deep dive.

It was the first story in the anthology.  I chose it because it was a good length and I didn't have anything against it.  Of course, analyzing a story this intensely makes you either love or hate the story.  Luckily for me, I was impressed by Doyle's intricate narration of the story.

I just scanned another blogger's post about this story, and their review showed a lack of understanding for what Doyle did.  So, in case you run across this story in the future, let me explain the narration style to you.

Blood is written using the third person, whom I'll refer to as the narrator.  I don't know how well you can see this in the photo, but things which are highlighted in blue or are not highlighted at all are either dialogue or this third person narrator talking.  This narrator gives the facts, with little to no flowery detail.  Here is a larger picture of two of the pages of the short story:

I'm assuming you are familiar with first, second, and third person narration.  There is another type of narration, a sub-type of third person, called free-indirect discourse.  This is when the narrator gives insight into the emotions or opinions of the protagonist.  It is easiest to spot when the narrator uses a word the protagonist would use.  Authors use this type of narration all the time, and you'll see it nearly everywhere if you start to pay attention.

An example from the picture above (I doubt you can see it, but it's highlighted in pink if you want to try) in the sentence whose beginning was on the previous page, is "and grabbed a packet of chicken breasts, one of those polystyrene trays, wrapped in cling-film."  While the first part of this is the third person narrator, the part which describes the tray is free-indirect discourse.  If the character had tried to describe the tray, he would have used this wording.  It is much too colloquial and loose for the narrator's voice.

This story does not just showcase one layer of free-indirect discourse.  There are two.  This character is changing, being overtaken by "an urge" to drink blood, usually from raw meat in his refrigerator.  Through his narration, Doyle brilliantly gives this "urge" a voice, as well.  In the picture above, the character's voice is highlighted in pink, and the urge's voice is highlighted in orange.

One good place to give you an example of this is on the second page of the picture above, in the middle of the page.  At the start, the urge is talking, but then the character takes over.

He took a fillet steak into the gents' toilet at work, demolished it, and tried to flush the plastic bag down the toilet. But it stayed there like a parachute, on top of the water.

 The urge is characterized by his animal desire for the meat, here visible in how casually this situation is discussed and in the use of the word "demolished."  The character steps back in when the plastic bag won't flush down the toilet and he feels incriminated by its refusal to disappear.

So in all, there are three people telling this story: the narrator, the character, and the urge.  They interact, which can be amusing to the alert reader.  An obvious example of their interaction is this (on the page after the one in the picture, my apologies if you could actually read the page in the picture):

But a light went on -- and he bit. Downstairs, right in front of him -- and the head came clean off. There was no blood, not really, just...

Here the urge, characteristically, interrupts the narrator, and then the character tries to justify what just happened. There is a marvelous back-and-forth that goes on between the three voices in this story.  The review I scanned said there was a "noticeable voice shift" in portions of the story (and they did not like it).  Can I just say that the voice shift is half the story?  I mean, without the voice shift, all we know as a reader is the character is fighting the desire to eat meat and finally gives in.  We don't realize that the character is struggling (and so is the narrator, actually) with an urge totally foreign to him and which eventually pushes him out and inhabits his body.  The voice shift is the story.

Oh, the nuances.  They are great.  Narration is sometimes everything, if we look closely enough.

By the way, this deep dive took me a few hours.  It's something I would suggest trying ... if you have that much time to spare.  It didn't feel like that long, if that's any help in persuading you to give it a try.