POVs

My group last class talked about points of view in The Spirit. Even before I was made to look closely at this aspect in class, it was something I noticed as I was reading it. I remember coming to “The Killer” and thinking how advanced for his time Eisner’s methods were. It was surprising, too, to go through and see just how many of the stories weren’t from the Spirit’s POV. We found that a lot of the time the POV started out as 3rd-person limited from the criminals’ perspectives, with the Spirit entering the story later. Then there was P’gell’s story, where even the narration was in her own 1st-person voice. There was even a movement in Eisner’s writing from the first stories, where the narrator was a 3rd person unknown, to the last stories which were narrated by the Spirit himself. What I found most interesting about this, I think, is that it allows Eisner to go beyond just following around this hero and seeing the different conflicts he’s part of, but to dig into deeper issues that a whole range of characters are made to deal with – take “Wild Rice,” for example, which delves into domestic abuse. We definitely wouldn’t have gotten the same depth on the topic if we had only seen things through the Spirit’s perspective. And “Ten Minutes” wasn’t about the Spirit at all – it was more an accident that it happened to be him to meet Freddy in the subway. I really liked that Eisner was able to give the reader so much depth in such a short space.