SOURCE: Weisenburger, Steven C. “Errant Narrative and The Color Purple.” Journal of Narrative Technique 19, no. 3 (fall 1989): 257-75.

In the following essay, Weisenburger examines the temporal inconsistencies in The Color Purple, noting the popular and critical reception of the novel's errors and themes.

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What would be required in developing a poetics of narrative error? Moreover, why has none been developed? Its foundation certainly exists, in the comprehensive accounts of narrative poetics that followed the paradigm shift to structural semiotics. Indeed, colleagues in composition pedagogy have already taken up “the phenomenology of error” while narratologists have yet to frame the comparable questions: What happens when the elemental techniques of narration go astray? What interpretive potentials might analyses of error set free? In particular, what can errors disclose about the socio-cultural horizon of a narrative fiction?¹

Some examples. How did it happen that the omniscient narrator of Frank Norris's The...