Voice and Perspective

Part I

Third Person Omniscient (the gloss)

• Establishes the dual narrative framing
• Distant and uninvolved in the story (like the reader)
• Distances reader from events 
• Gives private thoughts and opinions 
• Builds suspense
• Archaic language gives sense of 'old story'

The Wedding Guest 

• Intradiegetic narrator
• Present for readers to relate to
• Gives reality to supernatural events
• Makes supernatural events seem real to the reader

The Mariner

• Homodiegetic narrator
• Gives actions, details and reasons
• Mirrors the 'balladeer' as travels around from place to place telling a story
• Sometimes told through Third Person Limited 

Part II

Third Person Omniscient

• Gives insight and opinion
• 'inhospitably' and 'pious' foreshadow how the Mariner is punished and brings Christian symbolism. 

The Wedding Guest

• Stays silent signifying how he is 'spell-bound' and listening like 'a three years child' and how the Mariner is absorbed in his story/memories

The Mariner

• Absence of third voice signifies how he is being abandoned and condemned for shooting the Albatross

Part III

Third Person Omniscient

• 'dear ransom' foreshadows how the Mariner will pay price/will be punished
• Makes supernatural world explicit in questioning 'onward without wind or tide?'

The Mariner

• Told largely in his perspective signifying how he is being left alone while the crew move on

Life-in-Death

• Dice game represents the randomness that decides the fate of the Mariner and crew
• Signifies how it is out of the Mariner's control
• The internal rhyme represents the flippancy with which their fate is decided
• Represents how the Mariner will never fully recover and live a 'dead' life

Part IV

Third Person Omniscient

• Provides explanation
• Reminds of archaic language
• Relates the Mariner's suffering as repentance (religious in 'penance')

The Wedding Guest

• Makes the ballad seem more realistic
• Breaks the tension
• Contrasts real world with the supernatural
• Intradiegetic narrator
• Uses parallel phrasing to emphasise the supernatural features of the Mariner
• 'I fear thee' links to the Mariner's fear of Life-in-Death in the previous part

The Mariner

• Homodiegetic narrator
• Repetition of 'alone' and the limited range of vocabulary reflects barren existence emphasises isolation as punishment
• Stanza 66 echoes the harmony and unity in the 'one life' in its near perfect rhyme and rhythm and also the syllables being equal
• Repetition of 'blessed them unaware' emphasises the importance of his appreciation being honest

Part V

The Wedding Guest

• Interrupts the story
• Keeps presence of intradiegetic narrator
• Repetition of 'I fear thee'

The Mariner

• Sibilance creates smooth, peaceful, mellifluous sound which reflects the happiness and relief of the Mariner by being redeemed

The Spirits

• Confirms that a specific spirit is punishing the Mariner for betraying the bird that loved him
• Foreshadows the punishment
• Suggests a chain of loss and that man disrupts the sequence
• Explains the want for revenge

Part VI

Two New Voices

• Offers narrative and stylistic break
• The speech is structured like that of a play script
• Omniscient
• Presentation leads a didactic narratorial feel to their words
• Presented like guests -much like the Wedding Guest- but they leave due to some kind of appointment, again like the Wedding Guest but they are not compelled to hear the Mariner's story
• Lots of questions suggest concern perhaps that the normal laws of nature are not working

The Mariner

• The two new voices abandon him - isolation
• Seeing the Hermit, Pilot and Pilot's boy represents welcoming back
• View of the Hermit represents baptism - wash away sins/guilt

Part VII

Third Person Limited Returns

• Characterises Hermit
• Suggests that a Religious conversion is taking place

The Hermit

• Brings in sense of redemption
• The Hermit's position in the woods suggests that he could have seen the Mariner's crime
• Represents oneness with God and nature
• Suggests the importance of religion
• Rhythm of stanza 121 can interpret that nature and God are intertwined as all nature is God’s creation
• Serves as a foil to the other characters

The Wedding Guest

• Doesn't realise the importance of the wedding as being a holy communion
• The Mariner teaches him that a wedding is more than just a feast, but a spiritual union, which can be linked to the spiritual union of nature and man
• The reader gets a sense of things moving in full circle as the story comes back to the Wedding Guest (represents nature as having its own pattern- the cycle of life
• Shown to have learnt the moral to love all of God's creations which therefore teaches the Reader this lesson