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Character Analysis Of Miss Strangeworth In The Possibility Of Evil By Shirley Jackson

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In “The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson, Miss Strangeworth has lost her sanity and she is evil in some ways. She tells people everything they do wrong in the town that she believes is hers. She knows everyone in town, “I’ve watched my town grow” Jackson states (Jackson 188). She is old enough to have knowledge about everyone in the town, and she hasn’t left this town in her whole life. She also isn’t very humble. “‘They wanted to put up a statue of Ethan Allen,’” Miss Strangeworth said snotty”’...but it should have been a statue of my grandfather’” (Jackson 188). This shows that she wants her family to be the most important family in the town.
I think Miss Strangeworth is evil because she writes everything in capitalized letters in
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She’s judgemental and got exactly what she had coming for her; She’s the POV character from Shirley Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil”. Third-person single vision is displayed through a narrator not being a part of the story, and the main character, or the POV character, is the only view the reader can see; therefore, the character becomes more developed and the reader becomes more interested. Jackson chose third-person single vision POV for “The Possibility of Evil” because being in the head of only one character causes readers to have a closer connection with the character, all while maintaining suspense. When an author writes in third-person single vision, the reader gets an intimate look into the mind of the POV character, which works especially well when the POV character has a unique and different view than most. As some people believe, switching to omniscient would be the ideal POV because the view of others is needed to display Miss Strangeworth’s letter fell out of the mailbox; however, since the author only switches once, third-person single vision is still the better option as it is implemented more throughout the story.

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