Monday, April 9, 2012

How to use stories, poems to engage and create social awareness

Story telling has always been a captivating and favourite mode of leisure activity and at the same time, it accentuates reader to engage with the distinct features of the same. The hidden meanings and interpretations that lie buried under the suggestions are for the reader to explore. It is like a flash in a running brook. As pieces of writing, they do not merely narrate; they penetrate in the core of the minds of the characters where they enter into an understanding of how individuals think through their feelings.

Background:


In a short story, some of the formative elements include plot, theme, point of view, character, and setting. Birkerts rightly points out that explication of stories are an important part through which the readers get a massage. Chekov suggests that subtly blending together of characters and circumstances deliver a range of pleasures.

Ingredients:


Plot is a sequence of events why certain events happened the way they did in the story. Structure of the plot narrates the development process of the thoughts of the writer, its structuring of the elements. The structure can be varied according to the requirements of the story. For example, a writer will withhold the exposition until quite later in the story. In this way, he sensitizes the readers to know the end before completion of the reading. A classic example is William Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily.”


The plot development is further defined by exposition, the information needed to understand a story. Flashback is used to intensify the present actions encapsulated in the past version. Foreshadowing is the technique, the writer uses to plant the seeds for action that will follow. The story becomes mind boggling when it provides hints to what will happen later.

• Rising action is when the action / conflict / events intensify.
• Complication is the catalyst that starts the major conflict.
• Conflict refers to the forces opposed to one another in the story.
• Crisis is the turning point when the action reaches its peak. This is known as climax. It occurs when character tries to resolve the complication and finally the resolution which is the set of events that bring the story to a close.
• Epiphany a moment of startling, sudden insight gained by the main character as a result of the unfolding of events in the story.

The theme of a story is its moral. The theme of a story is its teaching. The theme of a piece of story is its view about life and how people behave. In a story, the theme is not explicit. It has to be grasped from the characters, action, setting and language.

In a story, the decision as to who is the storyteller and how the story is to be unfolded or narrated are of crucial importance. That gives the story the tone and the feel of the story. The teller is the crucial link between the action in the story and the reader. The point of view can be different types.




• Objective point of view: As the name suggests, the narrator is equidistant from all the characters in the story.
• Third person point of view: Here the storyteller does not participate in the action of the story as one of the characters, but the readers are free enough to judge how the characters feel.
• First person point of view: Here the narrator actually participates in the action of the story. The readers participate in the story with the teller.
• Omniscient point of view: This view is when the narrator knows everything about all the characters.

Character and setting are two other important ingredients of a well acclaimed story.

Character: It can be main character which is called the protagonist. There are some forces that act against the main character; known as the antagonist. The character can also be a minor character. Further, the character can be static or dynamic. In static, the character remains the same; he is inherently consistent while as a dynamic character, he undergoes a radical change in himself in the course of the story.

Setting: The descriptive setting provides a telescopic view to the values, ideas and attitudes of that place in different times. It adds an important dimension reflecting character and embodying theme.



Awareness:

Let us take some examples from literary works of various legends of the past centuries which attract readers to study their stories minutely.

1. Katherine Mansfield’s stories are delicate balances of perception, intuition, detail and nuance. If we go through her stories like “Bank Holiday”, “The Daughters of Late Colonel”, and “The Garden Party”, we find that these stories deal with an issue of change and the society is able to recognize the same.

2. Elizabeth Bowen’s evocative wartime story “The Demon Lover” shows the disturbed mind of the protagonist Mrs. Drover after her receipt of a letter from her presumably deceased boyfriend, prompting her to visualize the masterful dramatization of acute, psychological delusion of the culmination of paranoia in a time of war during the Second World War.

3. Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” gives a strong signal of feminist movement and she has utilized her writing power to uplift the distressed women writers in the era which was completely dominated by male bastion.

4. The gothic stories of mysteries are found in Edgar Ellen Poe’s writings. Poe unfurls a world of dark horror, cobwebbed allays, ghosts and mystery. The readers are mesmerized and sometimes frightened by perusing his stories namely “The cask of Amontillado”



5. Old age is very pathetic and nihilism pervades. One can easily prey to the narrow cultural and social conditioning of the old age which is disastrous not only to the individual concerned but also to the society at large. Sometimes, this “nada” is beyond delineation. But, Ernest Hemingway’s “A clean Well Lighted Place” has done so. He abandoned the florid prose and replaced it with a lean, clear style. His metaphor of iceberg theory has influenced generation of readers worldwide.

6. A well knitted story can explore to pent up creativity. For example, Steinbeck’s own creativity is reflected through his story “The Chrysanthemums”.

Like stories, poems can also inculcate strong message to the society at large.

1) Tagore’s poems not only entice us but also send sensational ripples of enchantment across our sense perception. His poem like a fairy tale guides us to sway with its rhythm.
2) “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a poem which underscores a sense of continuity with humanity across time and space. Walt Whiteman explores the possibility of humanity to be connected with one another through the thread of common experiences of life.
3) Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” attempts to poetically envision the entire experience of dying which mostly people do not enjoy.
4) John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet” made a scathing attack on death and dares to touch him.



With the above thoughts foremost in my mind, I emphatically conclude that story as well as poem vivify its readers to get across various types of messages.

No comments: