Medium Specificity

Read article here: The Metal Raindrop

Narratives can take on many forms: first-person, third person.  Narrators themselves can take equally if not more numerous forms, depending on the narrator’s identity, relation to the story, gender, level of knowledge of events within the narrative itself and the narrator’s own biases or lack thereof.  Scott McCloud iterates in his graphic novel Understanding Comics, where artist (author) and patron (reader) diverge is usually at the point when the understanding of what constitutes the medium they are sharing also diverges.  McCloud talks specifically about how comics separate themselves from painting, photography, and other illustration mediums. 

Literary narrative also has to separate itself from poetry, biography, and historical writing.  It is also not merely prose.  Literary narratives must have, as the name implies, a narrative—a story.  Literary narratives are a symphony that can only be properly performed if the participant and the author come to a mutual understanding through the narrator. 

Literary narratives depend on the reader’s ability to read, understand textual symbolism, and connect events to the overall plot.  Literary narratives depend as well upon the author’s ability to arrange language to fit the audience that is skilled enough to understand the narrative being written.  And when author and reader meet on the field of mutual understanding, that is where the fun begins.  

In The Metal Raindrop, many aspects of literary narrative are emphasized.  It explores the strengths and enormous power a literary narrative can have.  The Metal Raindrop also admits that literary narrative is bound by that which it reveals, for the Reader can never know what the Author has not yet written.  Our narrator reminds us of this constantly, pointing out things that the Author neglected to tell us.  And true to literary narratives, the Author only gives us the pieces we need to know in order to understand the story.

In the beginning, the narrator tells us of the lack of need for a large fire.  At the end, we realize that it is not just that he is alone in his study, but alone entirely.  And the end of the narrator is the end of the narrative, as a literary narrative should be. 

Our narrator also comments on one of the most powerful things a literary narrative can do: create images and ideas inside the human mind.  Since literary narrative can only function if the author can write and the reader can read, it is limited to humans.  Even within our species, there is limitation due to language and culture.

Despite these limitations, the written word has changed and influenced mankind since its inception.  Humans have tried to do physically what words do mentally, film and painting being great examples.  Many are the people who confess that they enjoyed the book better than its film adaptation.  And though film is influential in its own right, it still does not have the power of persuasion that a literary narrative has.  And as the narrator wishes, let us all hope that our own narratives end better than his.