Narrative shift in Oroonoko
A black African is captured and sold into slavery. It’s an unfortunate story, but one with approximately eleven million equivalents. Aphra Behn, however, brings this common piece of history to life in her story Oroonoko, the tale of an African prince tricked into slavery in the West Indies. As the storyteller, Behn makes use of two common forms of narration, the third person and the first person. She recounts what she is present for in the first person, while relying on the words of Oroonoko himself to explain what she did not see. The effectiveness of each of these modes of narration can be judged by two standards, the ability to effectively convey action and by the ability to portray emotion. Examining two separate passages of Oroonoko, each depicting Oroonoko in battle, can best illustrate these standards. The first of these passages, from page 2187-88(“While he was speaking….wounded him almost to death”), is a third person account of one of Oroonoko’s battles, while the second passage, from page 2199-2200(“sometimes we would go surprising…strong limbs”) is a first person narratative about Oronooko’s encounter with a tiger. Though in Oroonoko, both first and third person narration modes are necessary to complete the st
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 974
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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