Authors choose different narrative perspectives when they are creating stories, and different perspectives lead to different effect. After analysis, it is found that Katherine Mansfield uses focalization and covert progression in her story “The Garden Party”. These two perspectives work on different levels of this story but they are strongly correlative.
When talking about the ways of focalization, we want to know whether the narrator knows more than the character. The narrator can give all the information in a story, and he can also tell only what a single character has known. In this way, the narrator controls what readers can see and feel to let readers pay attention to some unique manners or habits of a character. When we analyze covert progression, we
will find it is a perspective hiding behind the normal plot development, attracting people’s attention by connecting the traits that the narrator has focalized, and having a hidden power of extending or overturning the plot development. Consequently, the two kinds of perspectives are related as dots and lines, and they both work effectively in “The Garden Party”. Nonfocalization and Internal Focalization in the Story
Nonfocalization is a narrative perspective in which the narrator knows everything in the story and does not use certain character’s perspective when in narration. In this sense, the narrator is as if holding a camera, catching every meaningful scene and every action of every character, and projecting them out. Meanwhile, the audiences (readers) catch the outside images that the narrator conveys, and try to figure
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out what is the meaning of these images. By using nonfocalization, Mansfield offers “The Garden Party” with an equal observation and a detailed description to all the things and characters in this story. As a result, we can find the story is supported by clear environment and culture background, and vitalized by authentic actions and mental activities which successfully reveal the personalities of the characters.
The very beginning of this story is a typical example of using nonfocalization to show us the environmental background.
Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing (Mansfield, 2018, p. 216).
This is the ambient condition where an upper-middle class garden party is going to be held. The narrator’s eyes are staring at the overall scene of the garden. Sky, gardener, haze, rosettes and roses are all contributing to the peaceful atmosphere in this garden, as if God has chosen this day to be the exact day of holding a garden party. All the descriptions in this part become the best annotations for the word “ideal”, revealing the environment background of this garden party.
Another example is a scene of the block where the lower classes live. “The lane began, smoky and dark”(Mansfield, 2018, p. 230). This sentence sets the tone of this whole place: unpleasant and depressed. The narrator gives the sketches of women, men and children in this place with precise descriptions, for example, women “hurried by”, men “hung over” and children “played in the doorway”
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