Narrative Voice in "The Bell Jar" and "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Olivia F. Vega College

Through the use of first-person narrative, authors are able to convey the innermost thoughts and desires of the characters they create. However, this narrative style limits the scope of the novel by presenting events through the filter of the specific character’s personality, which is often times flawed and self-serving. Though the novel, The Bell Jar and the memoir, A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius take place in distinctly different eras, the first in the socially restrictive 1950s and the latter in the more recent uninhibited time of the 1990s, both of the narrators experience an innate struggle to adhere to certain aspects of societal convention. Sylvia Plath and Dave Eggers foster unique narrative styles by developing particularly unconventional protagonists who share their own insecurities with the audience through neurotic thoughts and behaviors. Plath portrays her desire to stray from the societal convention of gender roles in the form of Esther Greenwood’s erratic and poetic narrative style, while Eggers exhibits his doubts about becoming a conventionally secure parent figure to his younger brother through Dave Eggers self-deprecating and emphatic language.

Plath and Eggers institute their narrator’s...