Comparison Between The Priest And The Rabbi 'And The Two Gunners'

675 Words2 Pages

The Forbidden Zone Response
Borden utilized a first person point of view in both “The Priest and the Rabbi” and “The Two Gunners”, and unsurprisingly this serves to make the narrative more relatable to the audience on a personal level; however, the two short stories apply this device in different ways and to varying effects. The first narrative, “The Priest in the Rabbi”, focuses primarily on the interaction between the general and the hospitalized burn victim, and barring their dialogue, the story consists almost entirely of sensory detail with little personal input or thoughts from the narrator, which would appear to have been intentional. The narrator’s observation that “[the burn victim] was a great talker, was No. 11. He must have been the wag of his village. He came from somewhere near Nantes. He had a very strong accent and a rough rollicking comical voice that bubbled out of him in a stream in answer to the …show more content…

In particular, the surreal and hallucinatory atmosphere that both books exude that is made more vivid by the use of first person that all of these narratives have in common, the nonchalance and numbness with which the characters react to what would have horrified them in any other context, and the machinelike and almost animalistic aspects that they take on when confronted or overwhelmed are recurrent throughout all of these

Open Document