Saturday, August 26, 2006
Hearing voices
Did Palahniuk succeed in creating different voices for his different writers, or did it seem as if all the stories were written by the same person? Did certain character traits revealed of the writers in the narrative or the poems come through to you in the stories they were supposed to have written?
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4 comments:
I don't think he succeeded in creating different voices. I think he has some deep-seated empathy issues that preclude this. I thought all these voices not only sounded pretty much the same but also sounded like the narrative voices in his novel "Lullaby."
Yeah, they sounded the same to me two. I think a lot of the stories may have been written before he even thought of the book; I saw an article where he called the short on the anatomically correct dolls "the sex story that 'Playboy' wouldn't buy." And Guts was actually published in that magazine in 2004.
Same voice for everybody, I agree. For all these people who supposedly came from very different walks of life, they sure had a similar writing style.
It's as if the book took place in a parallel universe where everyone communicated like he does. There were differences in the narrative voices, but they were far too subtle.
Of course, this may have been intentional. I think he considered this a novel, even though it didn't smell like one to me, and novels ain't supposed to have too different of narrative voices.
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