Role of the Narrative in Miltons Lycidas Essay -- Milton Lycidas Essa

Role of the Narrative in Miltons Lycidas This paper focuses on the voice of the narrative in the funeral elegy. To start, the concept of the narratee has been most deeply explored by Gerald Prince from a narratological perspective. Narratology is primary concerned with narrative patterns in manufacture. In this regard, any plan of attack to apply the terminology commonly used in reference to fiction (and prose) to poetry seems problematic. One has to account for the differences or the similarities between the genres in line of battle to put the discussion of the narratee in the elegy into its proper perspective. The current switch off leans heavily on Bakhtins study of the structure of the novel. In the Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin created a fall apart of wave-particle duality between the monologic (poetry) and the dialogic. The novel becomes the site of dialogical discourse par uprightness (49). But how valid is a wholesome distinction between genres deep down which the re is so much diversity? Doesnt Bakhtin create a dichotomy which pays little consideration to the possibility of polyphony in specific texts disregarding of conventional classification? It may be time to consider a literary work not as a predetermined harvest-time cast in a deterministic mold, but as a dynamic system that transcends the prevailing assumptions that are supposed to define its identity. The formal definitions can be just external to the composition of the text since we cannot have the reader to know exactly what the author intended to write without dropping into the trap of intentional fallacy. To be sure, readers from antithetic backgrounds can hear different voices in a text. Readers who are initiated in a particular literary environment may find the prosodic features they hav... ...enius. The death of Lycidas becomes a subject area tragedy. The principle of substitution works here the poet who reminds his countrymen of the previous life of a dead poet also pleads for himself, seeks visibility through public discourse. In the scene of the scarcity of patronage for poets in the seventeenth-century, a poet like Milton had reason to leave such a plea by appealing to the puritanical instincts of an hearing that would identify with a chaste genius who died in his integrity. The convoluted simile of purity is indeed a wish-fulfilling dream as Sacks points out (100). whole kit and caboodle Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin U of Texas P, 1992. Prince, Gerald. Introduction to the Study of the Narratee. Poetique 14 (1973) 177-96 (reprinted in English). Sacks, ray M. The English Elegy. Baltimore John Hopkins UP, 1985.