Structure
Rebecca's Tale is set in the summer of 1951 in England. The action is centered in Kerrith and the surrounding area, including the district near Manderley. The book is narrated in the first person in the style of du Maurier; however, unlike the original book, the narrator changes with each of the four sections. Part one is told from the perspective of the septuagenarian Colonel Julyan, who had led the initial inquests into Rebecca’s death. Part two is told by Terence Gray, an original character whose ongoing investigations are driven by a mystery from his own past. Part three is an extract from a journal kept by Rebecca, detailing the events of her early life. The final part is told by Ellie Julyan, the Colonel's youngest daughter who cares for her father at home.
The narrative shifts produce a very different structure from the original Rebecca, as well as a more postmodern tone that emphasizes the various narrators' unreliability. Also, the book is sometimes placed in a separate genre: while Rebecca is classified as a Gothic novel (du Maurier detested its categorization as a romance), Rebecca’s Tale is often considered a mystery.
Read more about this topic: Rebecca's Tale
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“The question is still asked of women: “How do you propose to answer the need for child care?” That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: “If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?””
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)