Style
Oz is primarily narrated by inmate Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), former drug dealer, convicted murderer and former drug addict. Now paralyzed from the waist down and wheelchair-bound, he appears in surreal segments and introductions that usually relate to each episode's overall theme. He also sets up scenes, introduces characters and adds epilogues. When necessary — usually when a character is introduced — Hill appears as an omniscient narrator. Used as a literary device of the writers, he narrates details of characters' crimes, their inmate identification numbers and their sentences. Hill appears as a recurring character within the show's story lines until his death at the end of the fifth season; he and other deceased characters share narration duties throughout the final, sixth season.
Hill's narrations break the fourth wall, as Hill addresses the camera (and thus the audience) directly, out of the fictional context of the scene. Hill also appears in scenes where he interacts with other characters in the story (in these, he does not address the camera). Only once did Hill appear to directly address another character with one narration; in the Season 3 episode "Unnatural Disasters," the character Simon Adebisi turns on a computer and sees Hill, dressed as a pharaoh and speaking to him. Adebisi was troubled by this event, but wrote it off as a drug-induced hallucination.
Read more about this topic: Carl Jenkins (Oz)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“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)