SITARA, Morning. Lovely to start off the morning by reading your posts as ever. Thanks for the quick resume of the stylistic anatomy of your prose in 'Sounds' - I thought the narrator was a 'she' as opposed to a 'he'. Very dangerous that is - little knowledge. You might perhaps append the remaining part of the story to this thread if there is one. Yes, the first person narration allows little latitude in the way of focalising other characters' perspectives - but then, as you rightly point out, it is the intimacy with which a writer feels most and readily at ease when expressing the deeper emotions of his/her characters - something the third person 'omniscient' narration perhaps, to a greater extent, fails to achieve . Reaching beyond the kernels of truth as it were. What I find fascinating about the short story genre though is the stylistic diversity that many generations of writers have brought to it - female writers in particular since Bloomsbury's foremost luminary, Virginia Woolf. Take Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl' as an example. You have absolutely no idea of who the narrator is, though we eventually know that there are two female voices. The story if you have not read it already is a very short one, an A4 page long; the complex narrative - internal monologue - is broken down by sporadic dashes, semi-colons, comas, and ends with a question mark as opposed to with a full stop. So there is very little sense of forward movement but its effects are massive. It's the charged intimacy with which Kincaid presents her subjects' inner feelings - you can feel the mother's rant to her daughter and vice versa. There is quite a bit of sensory perception at play there just like in 'Sounds'. A fine use of the 'stream of consciousness' technique. Talking about this narrative form in novels, one novel springs to mind immediately: Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple'. Wonderful prose - it's amazing just how eloquently her most celebrated character, Celie, expresses her inner-most feelings in her letters to God; only the first person narration could have achieved such effects and meaning. We see and all too readily sense, through her letters, the enormity of her misery and the oppression meted out to her and other female characters by the patriarchal authority and also enjoy seeing her achieving womanhood and thus her ultimate emancipation from the shackles of all the social ills. Her independence from 'the multiple jeopardy' - race, gender and social status. Okay, I have got to stop there - going off tangent again! SITARA, I might perhaps discount my deduction on the feminist element in the story - I was a little overboard there, I suppose, now that I know, the germ of the story predominantly rests with the child's sensory perceptions as well as his development. My Derrida deconstruction does really need some fine-tuning, mind you! No, I haven't read Nabokov; have read a few of his predecessors, the likes of Turgeneve, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn etc. Oh, some Akhmatova and Brodsky poetry as well. That's all. Have seen the film though - Lolita. Only Jeremy Iron could do it. Iron is one of my fav English actors. Iron steals the show as an English poet in Bertulucci's 'Stealing Beauty'. You must have seen the film. Worth a watch - some fantastic Tuscan scenes. I know, I have this obsession with Tuscany and Italy! Might talk about it at some other time. Have a good day. Carpe diem.