The Function of Voice: Narrating in the Third Person

[By Kenton Rambsy]

My discussion of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and their use of African American Vernacular English in their short stories led me to think about other short story writers and how their use of third person narrative voice can possibly reveal insight into the relationship between black writers and their reading audiences. In addition to short stories by Hurston such as “Spunk” (1925) and “Sweat” (1926) and by Wright like “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936) and “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1944), Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) and Rudolph Fisher’s “The City of Refuge” (1925) also utilize the third person to relate information to their reading audiences. The frequent appearances of these stories in anthologies over the decades might mean that we should give more attention to the common narrative modes that the writers adopted. 

Text Mining: Two Short Stories By Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

[By Kenton Rambsy]

Often times, there is a major emphasis placed on the ideological differences between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. In some respects, the tendency to highlight their differences overshadows their similarities. Besides, perhaps their writings have more in common than accounts of the differences imply.

I recently decided to focus on what the writers had in common specifically concentrating on how they used language in their short stories. To aid in my investigation, I used the text-mining program Voyant to analyze Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926) and Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938). Voyant is a free text analysis program that allows its users to sift through digitized texts and pinpoint similarities and differences among a number of texts.