The Hour of the Star: Narration Beyond Exceptional

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The Hour of the Star: Narration Beyond Exceptional
Clarice Lispector’s “The Hour of the Star,” tells a story of an uneducated woman as she deals with the atrocities of life, including poverty and sexism in Brazil (Lispector). The story was told by a narrator who had a magnificent delivery of words and emotions. This attribute, combined with his social standing, affected the novel’s structure.
Lispector speaks through the voice of the narrator, Rodrigo. In the novel, the narrator states that he shall tell a story with the structure of a “…beginning, a middle, and a ‘grand finale,’ followed by silence and falling rain.” (13). Here, one of the roles of the narrator lies in his standing in society, affecting the way the readers would view the perspectives of an individual belonging to a high social class while talking about poverty.
Listening to the narrator makes the reader foster distrust and trust from a personal perspective. Distrust can be built out of the question of sympathy versus empathy, such as how the rich can understand the poor’s situation without actually experiencing the struggles that the latter has to face to survive the atrocities of life. Conversely, trust can also be built gradually by k...