Shifting focalization in fiction produces deliberately uneven understanding of a debate.
Evidence
So The Submission is a novel that explores entrenched positions but also digs down to expose the dangers and doubts that often lie beneath uncompromising public posturing. Moreover, as Sonia Baelo-Allué has observed, focalization that shifts between the main protagonists sheds deliberately uneven light on the debates, producing a “constant crisscrossing of perspectives.” This is particularly the case in the epilogue, which fast-forwards twenty years to a time when the furor has died down, Mo is a celebrated architect now living in India, and his garden—ultimately withdrawn as a 9/11 memorial—has been built instead as a pleasure garden for a rich Muslim patron in the Middle East. The surviving characters get a chance to reflect on others and on their younger selves when Claire’s son puts together a documentary on the garden affair. One of the questions the novel raises but necessarily leaves unanswered is whether any common ground, any single truth, can be found through reflection. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 293
Categorization
- XREF: A transferable close-reading tool directly applicable to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s single-voice unreliable narration and Home Boy’s rotating perspectives. — connects to: Shifting focalization across protagonists deliberately produces uneven perspective
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Shifting focalization across protagonists deliberately produces uneven perspective