Bird song sebastian faulks6/1/2023 His emotions cauterised and his memories almost cancelled, Stephen becomes a sensory instrument. Some readers have complained of the character's "coldness", but this is to miss the point. A key to the novel's success and its evident hold over many readers is Faulks's exacting attention to specific, physical detail, seen mainly through Stephen's eyes. How can fiction do some kind of justice to the mechanised carnage of the western front? In trying to imagine the experience of combat, the novelist chooses to focus on physical detail and creates a protagonist who substitutes physical observation for emotional response. "N o child or future generation will ever know what this was like." This diary entry, written in the trenches in the last year of the first world war by the central character of Birdsong, Stephen Wraysford, reads like the novel's own acknowledgment of the challenge it faces.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |