Close-reading Exercise #2
Identify and analyze the style of narration; if you detect parody here, identify at least three substantial details the suggest or emphasize this.
This passage occurs in the first half of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce and provides the reader with third person narrative and free indirect discourse. The style of writing in this passage mimics the writing present in romance fiction or women’s periodicals such as Gerty’s beloved Princess Novelettes. Joyce sarcastically mocks romance fiction by using an excess of descriptive, sentimental and metaphorical language. Phrases such as “spiritual in its ivory purity”, “delicate as the faintest rosebloom”, and “her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow” all over-emphasize …show more content…
It is through free indirect discourse that Gerty’s voice breaks into the narrator’s style. The narrator can be identified by his masculine voice and descriptive writing style which inauthentically imitates a women’s magazines. In contrast, Gerty’s voice, genuinely feminine, can be differentiated because of her expository style. Gerty’s thoughts break into the narration as she recalls “those iron jelloids she had been taking of late [and how they] had done her a world of good”. Here the narrator has slipped into Gerty’s memories.This expository and reflective voice is very different from the narrators excessively descriptive writing. The language shifts a second time as Gerty remembers when one of her friends “Bertha Supple told [false information] to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie”. We know that this is Gerty’s reflective voice because her memory is interrupted when the narrator explains that “(the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of us mortals)”. The phrase “like the rest of us mortals” is significant because the narrator is suggesting he and the audience share the same view. This intervention into Gery’s memory is also important because the narrator is acknowledging the audience as a masculine ally which makes it clear the voice does not belong to Gerty and by default must belong to the