was actually loaded against me. My desire to move it in a more
progressive direction, and to include much more contemporary art,
was looked on with disdain by many of the board members. That
I had the finances under control, and that the gallery was thriving,
meant nothing to them. It was all power games I knew that, and Bob
and Eric—the artists on the board—must be playing their own game
because they certainly haven’t been backing me.This is a much more emotional and partial account of the situation. Notice
how Sophie stresses her own powerlessness and casts herself as a victim.
Note also the use of the past tense: I have couched it so that Sophie is
telling the story partly retrospectively. She does switch to the present tense
at the end, but the past tense gives her more opportunity to be thoughtful
and introspective.
However, the homodiegetic narrator can also be a minor character in
the narrative:
Example 5.4: Homodiegetic narrator, minor character
(first person)
And what about Sophie? You may well ask! That woman’s got too
many new-fangled ideas for me, and I was delighted to see her
trounced the other day at the board meeting. She is always trying to
put herself forward and it would be all very well if all we had to do
was hang up paintings and hope people would look at them, but
that’s not what it’s all about. She’s got her head in the clouds! I can’t
see anything in the pictures she’s trying to promote, they don’t mean
anything to me, and I suspect they don’t mean anything to anyone
else. With taste like hers let loose, there will be nobody in the
gallery by next year.Here the narrator uses the first person to insert himself more directly into
the narrative. He is probably one of the characters in the novel (again I am
treating the narrator as male). He sounds like one of the board members
who does not sympathise with Sophie, in which case he is a homodiegetic
narrator. However, he could be a narrator outside the story who is taking
it as read that he has special information: this is somewhat ambiguous in
such a small extract.
Again the first person brings the narration much closer to home, and
more sense of the character of the narrator is established. This narrator
comes over as philistine and conservative. He is not someone who is going
to spend too much time considering anybody else’s point of view. This is
important for how we view the story: when confronted with this narrator
90 The Writing Experiment