The art of the storyteller is to hold the attention of the reader. In the novels The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, the authors use multiple types of storytelling to hold the attention of the reader. The Good Soldier has a first person narrator named John Dowell while The House of Mirth has a third person omniscient narrator that mostly focuses on the life of Lily Bart. There are several storytelling techniques used by Ford and Wharton to hold the attention of the reader including ideas of the unreliable narrator, mountain storytelling structure and symbolism. The unreliable narrator is a technique in which the narrator is the only source of information for a story and may have some inconsistencies in their story. The use of the …show more content…
Mountain storytelling is the traditional storytelling where a story begins with an exposition, continues to mostly rising action, reaches a climax near the end and then has falling action and conclusion. The House of Mirth follows this structure almost exactly. This type of storytelling is mostly used to show obstacles that a character has overcome until the climax where everything goes right or wrong for the main character. The reason this type of storytelling is attention-holding is that readers begin to see the things the main character must overcome before they reach their biggest challenge near the end of the story. This is exactly the case with Lily Bart throughout the entirety of The House of Mirth. She is subject to many obstacles that she must overcome before the climax is reached. In this story, overcoming the obstacles simply means staying alive as most of the obstacles she encounters deteriorate her mentally and physically. The reader eventually reaches the climax of the novel where everything either goes right or wrong for Bart and, in this case, it goes wrong as she dies of an