Posted by Peter Ceresole on October 08, 2009 at 17:35:35 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Writing in the first person posted by Robert Hill on October 08, 2009 at 16:54:49:
I don't see authorial first-person asides to the reader as a particularly bad thing or a particularly childish thing.
I agree with you- it was a very common device presumably because it works for many people. But even as an eight year old, I remember it jarred on me when first reading SA on my own. I think it's simply out of kilter with AR's normal post-1930 style which is wonderfully spare and objective. I suspect that this is partly due to all that journalism in Russia. Good journalistic style is just good style...
Whereas being told that the McGinty was so named in GN (remember the story was that they were trying to conceal the location to protect the divers) because Dorothea suggested it wasn't disturbing in the same way. In fact, for many years after I read it, I believed that back story. In fact I think maybe I still do, somewhere deep down. But then of course anything that preserves the illusion that Dorothea was real has to be comforting...