Women’s Pantomime

Women’s Pantomime

Wouldn’t It Be Funny If I Actually Felt Something
“Women’s Pantomime” is a fun instruction manual written in a third-person voice. This writer does a good job of maintaining his voice throughout this story. However, there is one place where I felt that his voice tended to shift. On page 254, in the last paragraph, he gave one of his characters the name Ben Marcus. I think that this was done to add humor and give the plot a little twist. Unfortunately, the effect it had on me was to jar me out of the story. At this point, I found myself trying to figure out why the author would include himself as a character. The rest of the story didn’t seem to be about him, so why make it about him now? Additionally, this closing passage reads more like a poetic stanza than an impersonal instruction manual like the rest of the piece.
I didn’t have this problem with the author’s earlier use of the first person. In the third paragraph on page 250, the first person references seemed to point to a fictitious and generic author. During this section, the fictitious “I” never gives away their gender. References are made to “My animal mime practice,” “My earliest memories of my father,” and “My mother’s animal of choice” serve to place the narrator in what would appear to be a normal family environment. Contrary to the closing of the story, this use of “I” never drew me out of the story. In fact, I had just assumed that the narrator was a woman. The paragraph immediately prior to the one that begins with the narrator’s recollections is specifically written about women and since there is no clear designation to the contrary, I feel it is natural to continue to think that the narrator is feminine.
The author does make effective use of parenthetical phrases throughout the story. He begins using them in the first paragraph and repeats them all the way through. I like the way he gives us a simple definition then ties that definition to what appears to be a technical term...

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