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Spies Michael Frayn Quotes

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Michael Frayn’s method of shifting between past and present while narrating the novel Spies makes the story more engaging and more moving for the reader. He is able to effectively portray the innocence of childhood through narrating as an old man looking back at himself growing up in WWII and as a young boy living at the time. Frayn also uses shifts between past and present to better employ certain key themes such as withholding information, which is able to enhance how engaging and dramatic the novel is for the reader. To examine the question more careful I will look at some key passages.

To start off with, from page 37-39, Frayn uses his method of changing narrative in order to give us a deeper perspective of events and to collaborate with other main themes.
In this passage Frayn …show more content…

Here however Frayn uses the point of view of Stephen as an old man to fully explain what it is, “confused with the scent of the privet as the soft syllables of Larmorna did”. I believe this encourages us to trust the adult Stephen more despite out knowledge he has been unreliable previously. Only a few lines later the author completely diminishes this trust our trust again making the passage more moving for the reader. “It’s not Barbara. Of course it’s not. I don’t think it is”. The use of language here is as important as what is being said terms of the effect on the reader. Michael Fra uses a tricolon to slowly put down the readers hope that it’s Barabara Berill and make them question the truth in Stephens words, which wouldn’t be the case is he just said ‘it’s not Barabara’. This is a clear example of unreliable

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