Kingsolver

768 Words2 Pages

In the three books, The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees and Pigs In Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver chose to use the stylistic device of multiple narrators as a creative way to carry out the themes of the novel and establish the tone. This device is used extensively in The Poisonwood Bible in which Kingsolver states that when she was preparing to write, she knew that she wanted to use this structure, because it was it was “necessary for the theme of this novel even though I knew it would be quite difficult to pull off, from the point of view of craft. I spent almost a year just honing the different voices, practicing telling the same scene from all five different angles, until I had differentiated them to the point that the reader would instantly know who was speaking, just from a sentence or two.”
This novel is basically about what all the characters did in Africa, and then how they felt about it years later. Every character has a unique view of the events that happen in Africa and it impacts each of them differently. Kingsolver says she’d feel like she was insulting her readers if she offered only one view of the events that transpired because the issues the characters dealt with were so huge. By getting into the heads of each of the characters, Kingsolver successfully creates not just one main complex character, but five.
This device opens up possibilities to a writer that having only one main character would otherwise shut out. She had the oppor...

Open Document