To think that i saw it on mulberry street
She probably fantasized about cutting me up and serving choice bits as hors d’oeuvres at the next lesbian brunch or gallery opening." Muff strutted around me in her black jeans, tossing her sun-bleached hair and looking amused. I stood quietly, forcing my arms to stay at my sides, while Ms. In fact, trying not to get hard usually took up most of my energy. There’s something about being naked in a roomful of fully-dressed people that makes it hard for me to assert myself. I hated the way she used the royal 'we,' and I hated her version of my French-Canadian name, Jean. “'We have a prop for you today, Johnny,' purred the avant-garde lesbian-feminist art instructor I thought of as Ms. I live in a country where “Jean” can be seen as a masculine name, so I kept it for my narrator. Here is the beginning of a fairly lightweight erotic story (“Focal Point”) that I wrote from the viewpoint of a young man. Those who would like to find some dirt on the outwardly-visible me are likely to be frustrated when they learn that the “I” in a particular story is male, supernatural, or living in a past century. Part of the pleasure of inhabiting a different personality has to do with preventing malicious gossip, or thwarting the gossip-mongers. (“ Is this a dagger that I see before me? Out, out, damned spot!”) I like to inhabit other personalities partly because I secretly think of myself as a failed actor (have performed in a few plays, but never had anything resembling a career on the stage) and writing in first-person is another way to perform. The stories I’ve especially enjoyed writing have been told by an “I” who is clearly not me, or not the me who is visible from the outside (short, white, female, past menopause, Canadian). Whose story is it? Would it be told better by a major character who is directly involved in the action, or by a more objective (or more biased) observer? Looking over my own stories to find a general pattern of viewpoints, I’ve realized that I am often confused myself, especially while a story is gelling in my mind. Seuss” (himself a persona based on a pen name) actually see all the things he describes? Very unlikely, but this fantasy never loses its breathless air of immediacy because the narrator seems to be speaking directly to us, the reader. Seuss story, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” as an example of first-person storytelling. Too many of them seem to think that a story is written in “first-person” if one major character has all the best lines.
I often explain narrative point-of-view to bewildered first-year university students.