Author Question: What does the narrator report that she herself could not have seen orheard? How can she tell us ... (Read 164 times)

Davideckstein7 · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

What does the narrator report that she herself could not have seen orheard? How can she tell us things that she couldnt possibly know?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Note Woolfs pronoun usage, especially in the storys opening paragraphs.Why does she deliberately shift among first-, second-, and third-person perspectives?

What will be an ideal response?

JaynaD87 · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

The ghosts wander the house and talk to each other while the narrator is sleepingnot that one could ever see them. Perhaps she sees and hears them in a dream; or perhaps she imagines them.

Answer to Question 2

Poet and critic R. S. Gwynn addresses this issue as follows:

A Haunted House is clearly an experimental piece, using such Modernist techniques as fragmentation, repetition, and multiple perspectives, the same methods that T. S. Eliot, a frequent visitor to Bloomsbury, would employ in his famous poem of the same year, The Waste Land. Cubism, just coming into vogue in painting, seems most relevant to the storys opening, where the perspective rapidly shifts from you to us to theyre to one to I in a few sentences. The deliberate ambiguity in pronoun reference has the effect of merging the presence of the couple who presently occupy the house with that of the longdead pair who haunt it. Since the story has no exposition in the usual sense, the reader is challenged to fill in the blanks.