Binary Opposition in Analyzing Narratives - Book Report/Review Example

Understanding the role of binary pairings in a narrative is important in understanding the author’s point of view, and incidentally, opens the readers up in understanding the time when the story occurred and when it was written. Understanding narratives give us the key to access that part of history and determining how it affected the people during those times. In turn, it will help us understand how the events of the past lead to present events.

Warhol hopes that the new narratology – a method of analyzing culture through representations of experience within the tale’s context, will give us a better insight into how the binary pairings within the narrative signify the binary models within the society. Instead of binary models, another popular strategy used by more politically conscientious narrative theorists is the categorization of voices. This is to prevent being boxed in the either-or category. When binary models encounter diverse canons or perspectives, they tend to be disrupted by the differences. But Warhol does not believe that binary models should be eliminated in understanding narratives, and culture, at that. Narrative theorists just have to adopt various strategies that accommodate the differences within the categories or models given.

Feminist narratologists have criticized structuralist narratology for using limited and narrow categories as the basis of its analysis. What if the binary pairings do not conform to the canons? Using Gates’ theory of criticism, Warhol says that double-voicing, or making the white written text speak with a black voice, determines the narrator’s stance, either being engaging or distancing. A narrative has a narrator and a narratee aside from having a protagonist in the story. A narrator is the one telling the story and the narratee is the intended audience or reader. This does not necessarily mean that the intended audience is the actual reader. The actual reader is the one actually holding and reading the text, maybe days after or even decades after the original narrative was written. In Warhol’s close reading of Jacobs’ narrative, she emphasized the many parts wherein Jacobs’ narrator is neither distancing nor engaging, and the many parts wherein the narrator were both distancing and engaging. Warhol describes Jacobs’ narrator as disengaging. With this, the narratee becomes the “other” or the third part of the narrative. Jacobs’ text indicates that the narrator has the power to suck the reader into its world, making the reader feel the narrator’s feelings, the protagonist’s feelings, and the author’s feelings. All of which are different from each other. The binary oppositions that Jacobs’ used within her text allowed the reader to become engaged while understanding that the events may have been the reality of someone else’s life, not necessarily of the author’s. Warhol indicated samples of how Jacobs’ was able to make the narratee feel like she is the different one, not the slave in the author, in the narrator, or in the protagonist.