Finding a Voice: Point of View and Narration in the Color Purple and Jane Eyre

Finding a Voice: Point of View and Narration in The Color Purple and Jane Eyre

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambitioned inspired, and success achieved.” Notable words expressed by Helen Keller. She mentions the character of a person must suffer through hardships in order for the soul to build up, like a muscle, and thus achieve a goal through inspiration. Whether it comes from within, or from someone else, inspiration can be found in the novels, The Color Purple, and Jane Eyre. How the reader discovers this inspiration through the characters’ eyes is an amazing journey of self discovery. This self discovery takes shape from both novels through the characterization point of view and narration, however different and similar they maybe, that make each narrative unique in its own way.

First off, in The Color Purple, we are introduced to the main character Celie by letters she has written to God. The author chooses to write the novel in the epistolary format. Celie is essentially confessing what is happening to her through letter writing because it has become her only outlet by pouring out her feelings and thoughts, however stunted they maybe, after having been threatened by her Pa, “You’d better not never tell nobody but God” (Walker 1). In Jane Eyre, the first person point of view is established as Jane describes the weather, her surroundings, and her relatives. Instantly, when we come to realize the first person point of view, it is the reader who finds themselves engaged by Jane, as if she were having an intimate conversation with us “A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn…” (Brontл 91). This is how Charlotte Brontл grabs the reader into Miss Eyre’s Victorian world.

Conversely, with the epistolary approach, Alice Walker let’s the reader become a bystander, witnessing all kinds of atrocities and exploits during the times of African American men and women of the early 20th century. The author forces the reader into Celie’s world without apologies because of the way Celie writes; it’s almost as if she was alive. Likewise, as in Jane Eyre, Celie explains things the best she can, in the first person, on the other hand, her viewpoint is more immediate and concise than Jane’s because of her limited vocabulary and slang, “He beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church. I may have got somethin in my eye but I didn’t wink. I don’t even look at mens.” (Walker 5). The author uses language and speech to make these colorful characters come alive. In contrast, with Jane Eyre, the technique Charlotte Brontл wrote for the novel, picaresque, she has the reader follow Jane from place to place, meeting new people. As Jane finds herself in different situations, she knows as much as the reader knows because events are happening in the present tense. Sometimes a character recalls from their past, but mostly the reader follows along and experiences with Jane what and when she experiences new events and feelings in the present. The technique of first person and of writing the novel in a picaresque way gives the reader a less chance to foreshadow events to come, for example, in the case of finding Bertha locked in the attack. Even though we get a first hand account of what Jane’s thinking and feeling,