Character and perspective play a significant role in any literary work, and the function of these elements may vary in different creations. For instance, Zhou and Hall claim that the perspective of the writing reflects its author’s voice (346). Understanding the role of the literary work’s perspective is essential to understand what the author has intended to tell the readers. This paper aims to investigate the importance of character and perspective in The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou. That importance is well demonstrated in the first pages of the book, which is written in the third-person perspective. The author describes people in the book, saying that they avoid other people’s eyes “not because they know how bad they look, not because they’re in any way embarrassed” (Abdou 2). These words illustrate that using the third-person perspective allows the author to describe characters and present them reasonably, not hiding anything or changing facts. It can often be difficult for people to be themselves in the real world because of their fears and prejudice, but it is possible in a book.
I would argue that the author creates characters and has the right to show their authentic selves, and the third-person perspective allows the author to be honest with their readers yet makes them vulnerable. Furthermore, it is crucial to understand that a literary work is created with the intention that some people read it and gain some knowledge or information from it. Therefore, writers are likely to think about the message sent to their readers when the work is finished. According to Dahlstrom and Rosenthal, narratives have the potential to influence the audience through their writings (343). Moreover, researchers suggest that narrative messages might be compelling for influencing the readers and that directly depends on the writing’s perspective (Dahlstrom and Rosenthal 343). Third-person perspective allows the author to make their readers explore the characters from a viewpoint that might feel like their own analysis. In many respects, readers may even take (or mistake) the author’s thoughts and statements for their own opinions since they read a character’s description from the third-person perspective. The literary work under discussion, The Bone Cage, is an excellent example.
For instance, in The Bone Cage, the readers may use the description mentioned in the previous section to imagine the characters in the book. Specifically, the author states that they look bad and embarrassing, though they do not seem to care about that (Abdou 2). The author has an advantage here because we, as the readers, do not know anything about the characters in the book’s beginning. Through the close reading of the book, we can investigate them deeper and conduct our own opinion about them. However, the third-person perspective used in their description makes the readers analyze the characters in a specific way, pointed by the author. Obviously, it is not bad or wrong since the author is the one who created those characters, but it demonstrates how powerful the perspective in the literature is and how it can influence the characters. There is a difference between “they look bad” and “I believe they look bad,” even if the reader is capable enough to make their own literary analysis. In conclusion, I want to question my classmates: do you believe perspective can influence the readers, and why?
Works Cited
Abdou, Angie. The Bone Cage. NeWest Press, 2007.
Dahlstrom, Michael Field, and Sonny Rosenthal. “Third-person perception of science narratives: The case of climate change denial.” Science Communication, vol. 40, no. 3, 2018, pp. 340-365.
Zhou, Xiaodi, and Jori N. Hall. “Mixed methods papers in first-person and third-person: Writing voices in dialogue.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research, vol. 12, no. 3, 2018, pp. 344-357.