Let it be known that in End of Alice there is no ANP, only an ENP, and the ENP is the time during which Chappy is imprisoned. The “prison” time moves forward steadily and occasionally will jump backward in an analepsis to, roughly, two points in the narrator's past. The first analeptic point is that of Chappy as a young boy. The second analeptic point is that of Chappy preprison, at about 30 years old. Both of these times move slightly forward in themselves. The ENP “prison” time does not seem to cast backward homodiegetically—that is, we never are taken into a scene in which Chappy is a prison newcomer. He does describe such a time, but we are never taken there narratively.
[...] ‘Stop.' She puts her hand on my shoulder and tries to push me away.” At the end of this paragraph an ellipsis occurs. We are accelerated from the bath to a repeat scene, described earlier on page 152, in which a young Chappy sees Mama's menstrual blood on the sheets. The scene comes after the bath scene chronologically. Ellipsis. I get the feeling that Genette's terms do not precisely apply to this novel because Chappy's achronic movements are mostly faux movements. [...]
[...] But quickly Chappy seems to move into the realm of speculation: “Slowly, steadily, he fell in love, never losing the fear that she would turn on him, direct her anger at the five inches of difference between them.” This is a detail he cannot know, and since Chappy employed the fuzziness of the voice just prior for details he cannot fully know, why does he not do so again in describing the boy's fear of castration? Chappy offers an explanatory sentence for the reader: “though there is no way he could have told me this, I swear it is true, remembering it from my own experience.” Chappy is so certain that he does not need to employ the in this case. [...]
[...] With a wry smile he tells us that we are like him—we are getting aroused by the narrative, we are “staining its pages,” and we thus have a bit of the pedophile in us as well, if only because we can empathize with him. Homes's intention is to make us feel a bit guilty for the empathy, for feeling close to a sicko. Chappy seems to impose his pedophilic fantasies on Alice as well. This is hard to say definitively. [...]
[...] (is a word akin to anaspatial more appropriate?) in that they interrupt the ENP and take the reader outside of the ENP, and they seem to be told for durations roughly equal to ENP time: When the Correspondent enters the story it is the beginning of summer, Chappy's narrative projections of her carry through the end of summer, and the ENP—the book—ends at end of summer” (270). In this way, Chappy's running narrative projection (the Correspondent narrative) can be considered an alternate ENP. [...]
[...] The image of Alice flashes in his mind. His musing about the three girls has ended. Only then, on page 30, the paragraph section beginning with does Chappy return to the Correspondent ENP. But not quite yet. He says, have gotten away from the story at hand. And meanwhile, my new girl, my correspondent, waits for us alone and annoyed at the lunch counter in town.” We know that the Correspondent is “annoyed” because she is worried about her boy and is restless, but the language also suggests with the slightest hint of metadiegesis mean only in the sense that the character's feelings allude to the telling of her own story; I am not really employing Genette here) that the Correspondent is annoyed that her ENP has been ignored. [...]
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