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.
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)