The short story The Voyage written by Katherine Mansfield is about a young girl named Fenella Crane who travels to Picton with her grandmother on the night ferry from Wellington. Katherine uses many language techniques such as symbolism, contrast and point of view to help the readers understand the idea of adapting to change, and the idea of coping with the death of a loved one.
The Voyage is written in third person narrative from the limited perspective of Fenella Crane to help the readers understand what she is going through on the voyage. We are never told just exactly how old Fenella is, but we assume that she is a very young child, perhaps only about five years old. We know that she “had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up” with her father and grandmother. Phrases like “her luggage strapped into a neat sausage” and “he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream” indicates Fenella’s childlike, vivid imagination by giving a simple comparison. She might be showing her feelings of insecurity onto the boy. This sense of being helpless is also repeated when later on the stewardess refers to Fenella as a mite. Mansfield uses the third person narrative technique because it gives the readers some insight to Fenella’s feelings and anxiety about the death of her mother.
