Viewpoints- Obst Vw and Bank Robbery

     

    Obst Vw, by Sharon Solwitz, is a short story about a boy named Demian struggling alongside his girlfriend to cope with his relationship with his father. The story is told from a third person perspective, and with a narrator that seems to know more about Demian's thoughts both past and present, but not of the other characters thoughts. Demian is the primary character, and the audience learns slowly about his complicated view of his father. In Demian's past the audience is told about a specific example of his father's utter indifference toward him, and in his present the audience is told about his dad's refusal to acknowledge the tension between them. Demian describes his frustration with his father's emotionally negligent attitude, and the audience is shown that this will be something he grabs onto in the future to understand his feelings toward him. The expanded role that the narrator takes in this story lends itself to these three stages while maintaining the interest in one character that comes with first person views. Demian's view of his girlfriend is the most limiting part of the story, as it seems he is unable to read her during most of their interactions. The audience is shown directly Demian's thoughts in relation to his father, but he is more vague about his relationship with Rachel. They are on different wavelengths throughout the story, and there are times he shows difficulty in reading her like when her parents fight, or when they swap stories about their parental trauma. When comparing their experiences, the audience can almost see Demian's complaints as frivolous next to Rachel's, but the point is that he still mentions these experience because they still felt as powerfully.

    Bank Robbery is also in the third person, and follows the exchanges between a robber and bank teller as the robbery is in progress. Though Obst Vw and Bank Robbery are both set in the third person point of view, the narrator in Bank Robber has an expanded omniscience of the characters thoughts and regularly switches between them. The length of the story almost requires the multiple perspectives because the audience is not given any time to come to know the characters at all, and instead must be told their thoughts and desires directly. The two characters a parallel each other, and follow similar thought processes which are highlighted by the narrators repetition of phrases. The swaps from character to character come off a bit disjointed, and require the audience to take in their thoughts and actions more metaphysically than a traditional story. The content is not in the action, plausibility, or front that they bear, but in the themes that they characters follow.