In the following essay, Dougherty, a doctoral candidate at Tufts University, explores how Guest uses perspective-both in terms of the narration and characterization-to address several themes in her novel.
In both the style and the content of Ordinary People, Judith Guest is concerned with issues of perspective. Perspective refers here to both point of view and the capacity to view things as they truly are. Throughout the story, these two definitions of perspective are in conflict, and the characters are struggling to discover their own points of view as well as seeing the outside world, and their relation to it, more clearly.
The style of Ordinary People, appropriately enough, is one in which perspectives shift. We are given the perspectives of Conrad Jarrett, a troubled adolescent, and Calvin Jarrett, his father, in more-or-less alternating chapters......
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