Social ideals believed to be imperative within human society are well depicted in literature. Through literary works, playwrights are capable of expressing their personal views about life and social realism as they encounter it. Girl and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been are two stories with girl protagonists who experience similar conflicts (man versus man and man versus society). The current paper seeks to discuss the shared conflicts in the stories and discuss the narrator’s significance and point of view in these stories, which utilize second and third-person narrators (respectively). The reader does not hear from the protagonists directly.
As a mirror of social realism, literature is unequivocally conveyed in Jamaica Kincaid’s literary work, Girl . Girl, demonstrates literature as a platform via which Kincaid could express her interpretations of the norms and values inflicted on females by society. In Kincaid’s story, the motif of conflicts between man versus man and man versus society is demonstrated through the conflict between the mom and the daughter and the custom and modern or Western values. Kincaid, a modern-day U.S. Caribbean playwright, demonstrates in her short story the dynamics of human relations amongst migrants struggling to blend in the principally Westernized English society (Kincaid, 1991). In Girl , the writer demonstrates the protagonist’s problems as she and her mom’s principles clash against one another. In Girl , Kincaid enumerates the facts, or opinions of life, which her mom applies to her daughter so that the protagonist may abide by her mom’s guidelines, particularly regarding taking on the behavior and role that she should conduct in a social context. As the mother and daughter start their argument against and for Western values, norms, and culture, fallacies are apparent, in which the mom’s opinions are typically based on ideologies that lack rational or concrete basis.
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Similarly, in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, the theme of conflict between man versus man and man versus society) is apparent. The most obvious conflict is between Connie and Arnold Friend. A conflict develops when Arnold becomes too vitalized with his advances toward Connie. Arnold’s wish to make her accompany him and, ultimately, abducting her is the root of the conflict. In his attempt, he employs physical and psychological manipulation. Also, another instance of conflict between man versus man is where Connie conflicts with her family; that is, her sister and her parents. She perceives them as very old-fashioned and incapable of completely understanding her dilemma and her wish to be autonomous from them. The conflict of Connie with her sister originates from the point that Connie sees her sister as too “plain,” and incapable of grasping the necessity to be “fashionable” and famous (Oates & Wolff, 2013). Moreover, the protagonist conflicts with the society that expects females to be bound to their spouses and their household activities.
Jamaica Kincaid’s story Girl story is narrated from the point of view of a feminist. The writer uses the mother as a second-person speaker. Even though the storyteller is not a man, she tells her daughter to depict what is anticipated within a male-controlled society. The narrator struggles to bring her daughter up within the similar system that she was brought up in. To readers, it is apparent that the bigger part of what the mom instructs to her daughter is oppression. The speaker coaches her daughter to submissively serve her spouse and do every domestic chore linked to the housewife. Nevertheless, the mother doesn’t appear to acknowledge that the protagonist has her wishes as a female. Writing the story in the second-person perspective places a reader in the “girl’s” position, who is being taught several diverse life elements. When the girl is blamed for something, for instance, singing benna in Sunday school or on Sundays (Kincaid, 1991), the reader feels her defensiveness.
On the other hand, in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been , the opening - “Her name was Connie”- indicates that the narrative shall be narrated by a third-person limited omniscient storyteller. The narrative voice remains closely matched to the protagonist’s (Connie’s) point of view. The readers learn what Connie’s thoughts are; however, the speaker gives no extra judgment or information about the situation. For example, Connie’s inhumane assessments of her mother and sister are discoursed: “Now [her mother’s] looks were gone, and that was why she was always after Connie” (Oates & Wolff, 2013). Nevertheless, this evaluation is not the speaker’s but Connie’s. Witnessing the narrative’s happenings via a speaker who presents them via Connie’s eyes permits the readers to sympathize with her fright and simultaneously maintain a certain distance from the happenings. This distance offers the reader some viewpoint on the proceedings that Connie does not have. Maintaining a third-person narrative voice rather than narrating the tale in Connie’s own words enables the author to employ descriptive linguistic, which Connie will not utilize.
In a nutshell, playwrights, through literary works, express their personal views about life as well as social realism as they encounter it. Girl and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been are two stories with girl protagonists who experience similar conflicts. The current paper discusses the shared conflicts in the stories and discusses the significance of the narrator and point of view in these stories, which utilize second and third-person narrators (respectively), so that the reader does not hear from the protagonists directly.
References
Kincaid, J. (1991). Girl (p. 4). San Francisco Examiner.
Oates, J. C., & Wolff, T. (2013). Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Difusión, Centro de Investigación y Pubicaciones de Idiomas.
