![]() ![]() It seems that even if the focalized was shown to have mental process, as did Mr. Yacobowski and her presentation in the eyes of Mr. Yacobowski’s ignoring her to the perception of her blackness - “her blackness is static and dread” (Morrison 49) - she was perceiving how she was perceived by Mr. Therefore, if the focalized is considering themselves, they are demonstrating first-level cognitive embedment, and the focalizers who perceive this are demonstrating second-level cognitive embedment, and it is the same when the focalizer is thinking about the focalizer, in which case the focalizer has third-level cognitive embedment while the focalized has the second-level. If we think of Cholly as a real person, we may expect him to go through a more complicated mental process since he must have thought about Pauline or the child or both to be pleased, but his interiority was limited to what the text presented, which is but his emotionsĪctually, I would like to argue that the focalizer is prone to have a superior level of cognitive embedment than the focalized, since the readers can only access the mental state of the focalized through the perception of the focalizer. ![]() In this particular circumstance, Pauline considered Cholly’s possible thoughts on her pregnancy, showing a second-level cognitive embedment, while all we can know of Cholly is that he was “pleased”. When Pauline told Cholly that she was pregnant, Cholly “surprised her by being pleased” (Morrison 121). Being the focalizer means the character has a relatively more private or subjective display of interiority, and so the focalizers has the advantage that as soon as the subject or consideration is not exclusively themselves, they automatically go beyond the first-level cognitive embedment. Zunshine suggested that some characters are able to “embed multiple mental states,” namely they can present mental states not limited by their own, but can incorporate, for example, that of others’, and that of themselves in others’ eyes’, and she also claimed that the more mental states a character displays, the higher is that character in the cognitive hierarchy (Zunshine 153). Within focalization there is a subject (the ‘focalizer’) and an object (the ‘focalized’), the previous being “the agent whose perception orients the presentation” while the latter means “what the focalizer perceives”(Rimmon-Kenan), and from the nature of perception, we can conclude that it’s the focalizer’s mental states that will be reflected, though the interiority of the focalized may also be shown. Since “perspective”, “prism”, and “angle of vision” all require some level of mental process, focalization will inevitably touch on characters’ interiority. Examining focalization thus offers us a new way to look at, as opposed to “listen to”, texts through “the mediation of some ‘prism’, ‘perspective’, ‘angle of vision’, verbalized by the narrator though not necessarily his” (Rimmon-Kenan 73), and this “mediation” is not only between perspectives and texts, but also may turn out to be one between the writers and the readers. We often talk about a narrator or a narrative voice, but sometimes forget that the narrator also sees, or it is possible that even if it is the narrator who is “speaking,” what we “see” is through the narration is not from the narrator. ![]() As readers, when we look at a story, we instinctively pay more attention to the events and characters in the text, but do not care as much for who is telling the story (when the text is not first-person narrated), and even less for the perspectives from which we access it. ![]()
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