Through her quest to learn more about this person’s story, her own inner journey is set in motion and ultimately resolved. In the latter, there are two independent stories, usually taking place in different eras, that intersect because the contemporary protagonist finds a letter, diary, necklace, dress, photo, or other object that links her to an earlier character, whom she will never actually meet. Note: For the purpose of this essay, I’m differentiating multi-POV novels from dual timeline/dual protagonist novels. As with the elephant, several subjectivities are simply that-several subjectivities, offering a richer tapestry but not (necessarily) adding up to a single objective reality. None of the men perceives the whole animal each has access to a particular part of the truth, depending on where he’s positioned.Īs writers, we can take that idea and apply it to the social, cultural, and psychological positioning our characters-which is the rationale for writing a novel from more than one point-of-view. The idea goes back even further than Kurosawa, at least as far back as the Indian folk tale about six blind men describing the same elephant.

The Rashomon effect is “a storytelling and writing method in which an event is given contradictory interpretations or descriptions by the individuals involved, thereby providing different perspectives and points of view of the same incident” (Wikipedia). Lewis’s remark calls to mind the “Rashomon effect,” named after the 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa, in which a murder is described in vastly different (and incompatible) ways by independent witnesses. Complement-or contradict-rather than confirm. In other words, two perspectives will inevitably diverge rather than corroborate. Lewis noted, reflecting on the idea that it’s useful to view something from multiple perspectives: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”

A quiet life ethan joella summary