Compare the way that both Martel and Junger present a sense of place and mood in the opening from both novels.
Compare the way that both Martel and Junger present a sense of place and mood in the opening from both novels.
The opening of a novel is perhaps the most important part. It has to captivate and engage with its audience, make the audience feel they are there with the characters. Openings can often be ambiguous and therefore instil questions in the readers’ minds, which is a technique that involves the audience as it urges them to read further to pursue the answers.
Although both ‘The Perfect Storm’ and ‘Life of Pi’ share many similar themes and motifs, it is evident from the mere introductory paragraph that the two authors’ styles of writing are entirely diverse to the one another’s. The first word that comes to mind when describing ‘The Perfect Storm’ is realistic, it is written in a journalistic style which relays the facts in an omniscient way. It opens with a pre-cursor and also intertextuallity, as does each chapter, with ‘It’s no fish ye’re buying, its men’s lives.’ This with merely the first utterance within the novel creates a foreboding atmosphere, the declarative expresses the mortality of fishermen to the audience straight away in the bluntest denotation possible. Pathetic fallacy also adds to the eerie mood in the opening of ‘The Perfect Storm’ as the ‘soft fall rain’ that is mentioned in the first narrative of the novel expresses the depressing mood as the ‘Andrea Gail’ is about to depart to sea. Onomatopoeic language is also used, such as ‘trucks rumble’ as this gives the audience a real sense of being in the setting. In the opening of the perfect storm, no major events take place, it gives the reader the inkling that perhaps this is the calm before the storm, the audience can only anticipate what the fishermen’s time at sea will come to. Perhaps the most obvious diversity with the opening and in fact entire books is the Life of Pi is written in the first person, with Pi telling the story and with Martel as a narrative voice at various points within the novel, whereas Junger writes his story from an un biased third person perspective. The integrated facts and extensive knowledge of fishing boats does however create an omniscient tone. However the way in which Martel has written is extremely effective in the ‘Life of Pi’ as from the title it is evident that the story is going to focus around the events in Pi’s life, and being in the first person allows the audience to really relate to Pi as the audience constantly know Pi’s exact thoughts and feelings. The frame narrative keeps the reader engaged as they are basically getting two stories at once, both past and present tense. The novel is set in Toronto, Canada, Pi talks of travelling from India to come to where he is today. The opening sentence of this novel has also been used by Martel to grasp his audiences attention, with the bold declarative, ‘My suffering left me sad and gloomy’. This implies to the reader something has happened on his travels to make him feel this way on his travels.
