Topic 8 - Discourse structure and point of view > Being the author! > Our answer

Being the author!

The man's viewpoint: our version and commentary:

In my house search for the escaped murderess I came to a closed door. I took out my Smith and Wesson as quietly as I could, threw the door open and leapt into the room. There she was, sitting with a cat on her lap! She jumped up and lunged towards me with a knife and so I had to shoot her. She received a wound in her upper arm.

1st- person reference is consistently used in relation to the policeman, and the past tense relates to his past time. The woman gets 3rd-person reference. In S1 we have made the policeman refer to 'my house search for the escaped murderess' as he would need to contextualise what he was doing for his addressee. He would not be able to see into the room, and so we have referred only to what he would be able to see: the closed door. The door is referred to with the indefinite article to indicate that it is a new door for the policeman. The deictic verb 'came' indicates that he is close to the door. We will look more at dexis when we look at Linguistic indicators of point of view.

In S2 we represent what only he could know, his preparations to enter the room. We have changed 'gun' to Smith and Wesson as he would have detailed information about his weapon and would be likely to refer to it more specifically. We have also represented the manner in which he does it ('as quietly as I could') as secrecy would clearly be important for him. He is the subject of 'threw' and 'leapt', verbs which are chosen to represent his intentional rapid movement, and which in turn are consistent with an attempt to catch the woman by surprise if she is in the room.

The exclamation at the end of S3 is intended to represent the drama of what he sees, as is the division of the perception into two parts (compare 'She was sitting with a cat on her lap') and the grammatical construction of the first clause, with the deictic complement 'there' (which suggests some distance between him and the murderess) fronted in the clause. The cat is referred to with the indefinite article as it would be new to him. In S3 'towards me' anchors the description of the woman's movement in relation to his viewpoint. What the cat did is omitted, as it would be irrelevant to the policeman. 'So' and 'I had to' reduce his responsibility for shooting her, which would be consistent with his likely ideological viewpoint on the events. Although he makes it clear by the subject-verb relation that he shot her, it is almost as if it is her fault that she gets shot.

The use of the passive construction with the agent deleted in the final sentence takes the focus away from his agency and so also reduces, to some degree, his responsibility for what he did. He would be likely to be specific about where she was shot (hence 'upper arm'), and 'wound' has the indefinite article because it is anchored in the 'then' experiential viewpoint of the policeman narrator, and so would have been new information for him at the time the incident took place.

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