Almost 50 years before, in Edgar Allan Poe's short novel of the South Seas, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," a character of the same name was stabbed and eaten by his starving shipmates in a maritime disaster.
The level of interactivity in data visualization (low vs. high) was varied, along with the level of interactivity in a narrative of an obese character (low vs. high) in a 2 × 2 factorial-design experiment with 385 valid participants.
Some, from Dickens's David Copperfield to Ian McEwan's Atonement, tell the "back-narrative" of how a character has become a novelist.
This opening scene, roughly a page long and presented in dialogue, briskly demonstrates what might be called the rubbernecking principle of narrative exposition: a character can be made to seem interesting by showing other characters pointing fingers or making comments.
"He had failed to make a compelling enough case for himself, failed in crafting a narrative of his character and convictions that could move voters," the authors wrote.
And then -- most important -- it delivers the ancient narrative satisfaction of seeing a character deal with the inexplicabilities of time, the prospect of his own extinction.
Skippy is a pill-taking, meekly deranged fourteen-year-old, whose truncated coming-of-age serves as the central narrative of a book bursting with characters and incidents of wildly varying registers.
By The New Yorker September 8, 2010 The eponymous main character of "Skippy Dies," Paul Murray's dark yet hilarious second novel, is described in this week's review as a "pill-taking, meekly deranged fourteen-year-old, whose truncated coming-of-age serves as the central narrative of a book bursting with characters and incidents of wildly varying registers".
The belief at the heart of Buddhism, that each successful Lama is the new incarnation of this human manifestation of the Buddha, allows screenwriter Melissa Mathison the marvelous narrative trick of a main character who discovers his history alongside the audience.
