Analyse the ways in which Wilkie Collins constructs the narrative in 'The Moonstone'
During the period The Moonstone was written (in the late 1860's), detective
novels were unheard of. This made Collins objective all the more challenging. He had set out to write a detective stories that would get people hooked for generations. To do this he constructed a very complex and in depth set of narratives that interact and play off each other. Unlike the many detective novels to follow he does not just write a linear story from the one point of view, but manages to successfully alternate between a number of narratives contributed by many of the main characters.
With this way of writing Collins, who is very sympathetic to the so called
'freaks' of Victorian society, manages to make the reader accept the 'freaks' as normal human beings. For example he portrays limping Lucy as a poor, harmless young woman whom has no friends except Rosanna because of her looks.
Franklin Falls (1)
Franklin Falls (4)
Wilkie Collins.For me, the reader
this made me think about how hard it must really have been to have had a disability in
Victorian society, and also must have changed the hard hearted opinions of some
Victorian readers. Although this was a very good piece of descriptive and emotional
writing in the book and in my belief very well adapted for the1972 edition on BBC 1,
I think that in the 1996 edition on BBC 2 this particular section was not acted very
well as Lucy was cast as a very spiteful and selfish character.
The way the narrative is written has some positive, and some negative
effects on the story as a whole. On the positive side, it does not allow you to get bored
with the book. It achieves this by changing the...