"The Child," #3

The power of voice...(and a bounty of Hawkins resources)

You’ve done such a wonderful, creative, energetic job of investigating the structure of “The Child.”  Thank you for all of your hard work.  It’s really a wonder.

Now I want to turn you loose on another aspect of the story, which some of you have already mentioned in the comments – and that is its voice.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins (image from Boulder Book Store)

If you’ve read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, you’ll be familiar with this idea: if we want to know something about the heart of a piece of fiction, we might want to look at the places where it diverges from “normalcy;” that is, the features of the story that, as we read, we especially notice.  Certain features that leap out at us, call for our attention, distract us, even.  These features – these excesses, we might call them – often tend to be intrinsic to the meaning of the story.

Throughout “The Child,” the language is, in places, slightly unusual, relative to the way we might “normally” say a thing.