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Analysing voice in the contemporary Canadian short story

University of British Columbia

This thesis is about voice in short fiction. In particular, it is about the multiple voices at work in a series of contemporary Canadian short stories. Little attention has been paid to voice in Canadian fiction; the purpose of this study is to show that voice is important by examining the ways in which voices come into play in these texts. This dissertation will illustrate some of the ways in which voices may be listened to; it will provide a demonstration of the kinds of reading that may be done when voice is situated at the core of the interaction between reader and text. Because the subject of this dissertation is narrative voice, the first chapter is devoted to a consideration of what the narrator is: what the term implies, how narrators have been distinguished from authors, implied authors and characters, and where difficulties arise in making such distinctions. Each of the remaining chapters focusses on the short fiction of an individual author. Chapter Two highlights elements of repetition and surprise in Leon Rooke's story "Shut Up." Chapter Three addresses the interplay of voices in Terry Griggs' "Unfinished." The fourth chapter analyzes two short stories by Douglas Glover, "Red" and "Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon"; these are both first-person narrations and the analysis reveals how the apparently singular "I" of each story plays host to a variety of competing voices and identities. The principal subject of Chapter Five is polyphony in Mavis Gallant's story "The Pegnitz Junction"; the discussion focusses on the complex interweaving of character-voices, and the role of the omniscient narrator. This dissertation comprises a series of analyses of Canadian short fiction, analyses which illustrate the techniques involved in identifying fictional voices. It argues that short story criticism in Canada has, for the most part, failed to address the issue of voice, and that voice-centred reading strategies make a significant contribution to the critical repertoire of readers of fiction.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-04-06

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6824

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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