Sie sind auf Seite 1von 2

A story within a story

If you looked back into your life, you would realize that your life story is
somehow linked to other peoples story. So far in your life, you are who you are
because others have passed by, and each person has left something to you,
some have left you good things, some others have left you a scar in your heart,
but every single being that has showed up in your story has done something
that has changed you, and today you are who you are, you feel the way you
feel and you have achieved what you have achieved, because of all that. In
other words, every person we know leaves us something, and that person has
his or her own story, but still contributes to ours. If you took out of your story
one of the people that you were with, in the past, maybe your present would
change, a little, or very much, according to how deep did that person affect you
in that moment of your story. Another thing is that you have a different
perception of how the things really happened. If you had a boyfriend or
girlfriend when you were eighteen years old, you might say that he or she was
a horrible human being and hurt you, thats the reason you broke up with him
or her. But if we asked for his opinion, the story would change a lot from his
perspective. If we could go a little deeper into your boyfriends or girlfriends
story, the things would also change because we would know why that person
acted the way he or she did. As I already said, our lives are closely related to
others; it is a story linked to many other stories. A very good example of this is
the story written by Mery Shelley, Frankenstein. In Frankenstein there are parts
in which we can see how a person speaks through a second person and the
second person through a third person, and so on (Felix speaks through the
monster, the monster speaks through Frankenstein, Frankenstein speaks
through Walton, and through Walton we get it). Although sometimes it can be a
little confusing for the reader, having different layers of narrative is very good
for a story, since it provides the reader with context, multiple perspectives, and
multiple stories.

A story with different layers of narrative provides the reader with something
that is extremely important to understand the story; context. The context is a
very important issue in everything. Without it is quite difficult to understand a
story or something worse, we misunderstand it. In the case of Frankenstein we
can see this issue very clearly, with the killing of William, and the false
accusation over Justine. Nobody else knew that the monster at first did not try
to kill William; he actually saw in the child a hope for him to be accepted.
According to the book, the child was for the monster a being innocent and
without prejudices, which meant that maybe the child was not going to hate
him as others had. If we think about it, the monster was the only one who knew
all these things, and if he had not had the chance to tell us as readers all that
though Victor Frankenstein, and then through Walton, we would have never
known how things really happened. As we can clearly see, this multiple layer of
narrative enables us to go deeper into the story and see everything from a
different point of view. Thanks to the monster talking through Frankenstein and
then through Walton, we can know how came that Justine had the lock with
Carolines picture, and the short time that the monster and little William spent
together, before the child mentioned his fathers last name Frankenstein. The
kid was choked and the monster confessed that he himself put the lock on
Justines jacket, when he found her sleeping in a farm. As we can see, thanks to
the monsters tale, we get to know how things came about.

A second advantage that a multiple layer of narrative story has is related to


multiple perspectives. In the story, we have two main characters, which are
Victor Frankenstein and the monster, also called hideous thing, wretch, demon,
etc. Each of these two main characters of the story has a very different
perspective of the things that happened. In the case of Victor Frankenstein, he
sees the monster as a demon, he thought that the monster was evil since the
beginning of his existence, which is not the case.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen