Small Town: Mariposa, Ont Essay

“I” am not always me; in fact, “I” am sometimes him or her or you. In Leacock’s “Small Town: Mariposa, Ont.”, “A, B, and C”, and “My Financial Career”, the story is told in a first person point of view. This method is often used to place the reader in the position of the narrator. Yet, he is able to detach the reader from the narrator through use of second person, self-deprecation, and anonymous narration. The attachment from the first person along with the detachment creates a familiar tone used to emphasize each work’s rhetorical purpose. As we can see, Leacock frequently uses second person pronouns to refer to you. It creates an informal familiarity between you and me –the narrator. With this, he can imply characteristics or opinions that

Leacock does not use a specific person to tell the stories. The anonymous narration creates a third person from both Leacock and the reader. The author is then able to manipulate this character, increasing and decreasing the distance between the two. The use of first person in combination with an unidentified narrator decreases the distance because the reader sees the pronoun “I” as oneself – the lack of name causing “I”’s identity to be ambiguous. Yet, Leacock is able to increase distance through second person and self-deprecation. The constant push-pull method gives the feel of inclusion within the storytelling. The narrator speaks to the reader as if they are a different person, yet uses a closeness that the two are seemingly on the same side. This connection allows Leacock to assign the opposite of his own views onto the narrator and in turn, the reader through first person. For example, in “Small Town: Mariposa, Ont.”, Leacock has the narrator in the perspective of an overly prideful country dweller. The use of anonymous first person secondhandedly places the reader in that same position. This, paired with the detached narration, allows the reader to see the story through the narrator’s eyes while remaining at a far enough distance to form thoughts akin to Leacock’s rhetorical