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The Third Person Narrative Perspective

Decent Essays

The third-person narrative perspective became popular in the Victorian Era. One would deem the 3rd person narrator to be more reliable and objective as an external viewer, yet in A High Wind in Jamaica, written by Richard Hughes, it is evident that the narrator is unreliable and inconsistent. He becomes a part of the story, unable or unwilling to hide his bias and prejudice. To better understand the unknown narrator in Hughes’ book, one must elucidate on the limitations of the narrator’s abilities, his bias against children, and his child-like behavior.
The narrator explicitly acknowledges that he is unable to read certain people’s minds, allowing himself to appear vulnerable and relatively powerless to the reader. The first group of the people whose minds he cannot access are the adults. He states, “Jose gave a cry of alarm, sprang onto the cow’s back, and was instantly lowered away—just as if the cinema has already been invented. He must have looked very comic. But what was going on inside of him the while it is difficult to know,” admitting how arduous of a task it is to read adults’ minds. (Hughes, 110) Although the narrator is best at accessing Emily’s thoughts, that ability is majorly tarnished once Emily gets to the stage of self-realization, and fully stopped once Mr. Mathias, the lawyer, speak to Emily. The narrator writes, “What was in her [Emily’s] mind now? I can no longer read Emily’s deeper thoughts, or handle their cords. Henceforth we must be content to

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