Topic 8 - Discourse structure and point of view > Discourse structure of 1st and 3rd person novels > Task A

Discourse structure of 1st and 3rd person novels

Task A - The discourse architecture of 1st-person narration: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

In Charlotte Brontë's famous novel Jane Eyre, Jane tells the story of what happened in her life from when she was a small girl to her marriage to Mr Rochester at the end of the novel. She is thus a typical 1st-person narrator, a narrator who is a character in her own story. Readers also often feel that she is telling the story to them directly, and indeed at the end of the novel she actually says 'reader, I married him'.

Draw what you think is the overall discourse architecture for this novel and compare it with our diagram. For the purposes of the diagram, pretend that she is telling us about something which she said to Mr Rochester just before the wedding.

Our diagram

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