Skip to main content

Why does the narrator in "A Mother In Mannville" have no name?

The short story "A Mother in Mannville" follows the narrator as she meets a young man named Jerry who claims to be receiving gifts from his mother, who has gone away and left him at the orphanage. At the very end of the story, it is revealed that Jerry has been untruthful and has no mother at all. 


The story is written in the first person, from the narrator's point of view. This allows the author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, to seamlessly hide the fact that the audience never finds out who the narrator is. While the exact reason for not knowing the narrator's name is never explicitly stated within the story, there is a reason that can be inferred based on context.


The reason the audience never finds out the narrator's name is simply because Rawlings wanted to let the reader experience the same thing the narrator experiences throughout the story. By not revealing the narrator's name, the reader can more easily put themselves in her shoes and feel the emotions right along with her. For example, in paragraph 49, it states: 



For a moment, finding that he had a mother shocked me as greatly as anything in my life has ever done, and I did not know why it disturbed me. Then I understood my distress. I was filled with a passionate resentment that any woman should go away and leave her son.



This passage, and several others like it, is designed to allow the reader to feel the same thing the narrator feels. The reader is not looking at this situation through someone else's eyes but rather through their own.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more