That day Mary was not going to die but the road was too slippery.
“The road is so slippery”, I thought. “A perfect day for a car crash.” My father told me that car crashes were the most frequent when a thin and treacherous layer of ice covered the roads It was always hard for me to imagine that a layer of frozen water could kill more people than any maniac or other natural phenomena far more impressive than one millimeter of a seemingly peaceful layer of frozen water. I have always thought that a volcano eruption or an earthquake was far more dangerous than a slippery road I could see through my window every day. “A perfect car, if only I could have only one ride on such a car”. A brand-new, shining, sparkling, glamorous black Porsche rounded the corner unimaginably swiftly. “A lightning…”. It swept past my window and I could only follow it with a rapturous glance until it approached the crossroads and I heard a terrible screech of breaks. It was too late. The Porsche ran into a girl with marvelous long fair hair. Somehow, I knew it was too late to help her. “A perfect day for a car crash”, I thought.
“It is a perfect day to do something good. What shall I do? Shall I stay in bed doing nothing at all? In fact, I can let myself relax a bit. Oh, no. I have made a promise to myself and I should keep it. What a wise idea it was to decide to perform at least one good did every day! Oh, how much good I will do in my life! At least one good deed a day makes 365 good deeds a year! So, a will not waste this day, I will go and help someone, but, first, I want to do something good for myself. Let us change something. Oh, I know, I will go a have my hair cut, it is too long already”, so thought Mary combing her long fair hair in front of the mirror the morning she was going to die.
In the presented narrative, we are trying to create a piece of expressive writing devoted to the idea of fatalism: you cannot plan your life as you never know what will happen to you next moment. Do good to everyone as long as you can.
In the first draft, we have made use of such presentations of time as scene, since the story-time and discourse time are theoretically equal in this case (O’Neil 43). We describe two scenes, the first precedes the second one in the narrative but according to the sequence of events in the story, the second scene should precede the first one. Thus, we make use of prolepsis, telling the audience beforehand that the girl was not going to die. This is like a hint at the future tragedy. This prolepsis is immediately followed by the second one, when the narrator says that it is a perfect day for a car crash. Besides, the third case of prolepsis can be observed as well when the narrator mentions that the girl had long fair hair.
As for the narrator, he/she is homodiegetic as he/she is the observer of the car crash. The story is presented as the first-person narration. In the second part of the story, Mary’s speech is predominant and the phrase “so thought Mary combing her long fair hair” should belong to another narrator, he/she is heterodiegetic as he/she is not a character of the story. In the second draft, it is necessary to distinguish that there are two scenes in the story, each has its own narrator. In the first draft, it is not exactly clear.
By means of the use of prolepsis, we wanted to add a dramatic effect to the narration. The same can be said about the homodiegetic narrator who enables us to see the tragedy with our own eyes. The heterodiegetic narrator reveals the name of the girl and states once again that she is going to die.
It is possible to conclude, that the dramatic effect is successfully achieved mainly due to the use of prolepsis and homodiegetic author. The heterodiegetic author of the second part of the narrative reveals to the author that the thoughts about doing good things to people belong to a girl who will die in several minutes. This narrator stated that the girl has fair hair; the same fact had been stated by the previous narrator. Thus, all these strategies relating to time and the narrator enhance the dramatic effect of the story.
Works Cited
O’Neil, Patrick. Fiction of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory. Canada: University of Toronto Press.