The ending of The Moslem Wife tells us what the story is about—the point—if you will. We talked last week about how the style of the story shifts, with the past imperfect sections diminishing, the appearance of paragraph breaks. There is also a greater use of Netta’s consciousness, more in her own language and voice than that of the Narrator’s. Here’s a nice example: “Not a hope, she was trying to tell him…If I say it, I am free…If I relied on my memory for guidance, I would

What is the style of The Moslem Wife? By way of review, fictional style can be thought of as the implied author, an entity who mediates between the text and the real flesh and blood author, in this case, Mavis Gallant. Each particular story has its own style, expressed in terms of narrative structure, use of language, use of time, etc. It is the way the story is told. As readers of the all important last blog entry know (we happy few!), my theory about Wife is that it’s told

From the outset, the Narrator entity of The Moslem Wife expresses cutting judgements of the characters, skewering their vanities and exposing their vulnerabilities. The first sentence is a prime example: “In the south of France, in the business room of a hotel quite near to the house where Katherine Mansfield (whom no one in this hotel had ever heard of) was writing “The Daughters of the Late Colonel, Netta Asher’s father announced that there would never be a man-made catastr