Point of View
Though there are two main characters, the point of view is almost entirely Liz's. Jim only speaks five sentences, and readers get only a few brief glimpses inside his head. Liz has fallen in love with the "things" of Jim—his mustache, his white teeth, his walk—but knows nothing about him as a person. Hemingway sympathetically explores her conflicting emotions. He understands the adolescent fantasies of this naive young woman, even as they lead to a brutal conclusion. Like many young women before and after her, she is surely disillusioned, but she will learn from her painful experience. Jim, on the other hand, will wake up and not remember a thing.
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Famous quotes containing the words point of view, point of, point and/or view:
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“When we are in love, the sentiment is too great to be contained whole within us; it radiates out to our beloved, finds in her a surface which stops it, forces it to return to its point of departure, and it is this rebound of our own tenderness which we call the other’s affection and which charms us more than when it first went out because we do not see that it comes from us.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”
—Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)
“Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m
Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)