1)While reading Culler’s chapter on “Narrative” I began thinking about the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. I had recently re-watched this movie a few days ago and when ideas of narrative were being thrown around by Culler I immediately started musing on the way different stories are told in the flick. Throughout the film, the story switches from first person to third person perspective. The main character “Ferris Bueller” oftens speaks in the first person and addresses himself as “I”. This is usually done when he looks at the camera and “breaks the fourth wall” :

For example, in the beginning of the movie Ferris talks in the 1st person and then looks at the camera and explains to us, the audience how he goes about faking sick to his parents so he is able to stay home from school. Directly after this scene the movie returns to 3rd person as we see Ferris speaking with his parents and feigning illness. This sort of things happens all throughout the film. I think it is cool how the main character serves as both an actor and narrator in his own story. I think this is done by the writers and directors to give us greater empathy towards the protagonist as well as the people close to him. In my opinion this technique creates greater depth for the story.

2) I think in “What Stories Do” Culler tries to explain that narrative stories create a sort of “pay-off” to the readers for embarking on the journey of the story. This can be a come-up-pence of a deserving character or a flipping of a common convention. It seems as if Culler is saying that stories reward us for our engagement in this way.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.