Okay, so I guess I must already retract my musings and admit to being a "poor" close reader: On page 59, the doctor Simon Jordan is looking at the same portraits I mentioned seeing on page 10, and reading underneath which is clearly written: Grace Marks, alias Mary Whitney.
But where have I lost my discipline in remaining attuned to all words, phrases, meanings? Was I thrown back to my Golden Book days of the visual upon seeing the line drawings, awaiting my father’s voice to confirm or supply a new story to go along with the image?
Maybe I have become a text person, despite the new media training to look at all. In a recent reading by Steve Ersinghaus of his flashfictional "Stoning Field," I realized that I was reading the screen along with him, thinking only that my tendency was due to my editing nature when with the sound of both film audio and human voice along with graphical images I should have been involved in the event of it rather than still concentrating on the written words.
But here, perhaps, a reason why I love written words:
Dora is stout and pudding-faced, with a small downturned mouth like that of a disappointed baby. Her large black eyebrows meet over her nose, giving her a permanent scowl that expresses a sense of disapproving outrage. (…) He has tried imagining her as a prostitute–he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters–but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health. Dora is a hefty creature, and could snap a man’s spine in two with her thighs, which Simon envisions as greyish, like boiled sausages, and stubbled like a singed turkey; and enormous, each one as large as a piglet. (p. 57)
Well now, we certainly have a picture of Dora, the serving woman who works at the house where Simon is renting a room. Instead of merely describing Dora, Atwood uses the third person omniscient narrative voice (switching from the first person in the beginning of the story from Grace’s pov) to draw her in Simon’s head. It does make it more interesting, as well as adding some information about Simon himself, and how he thinks, without telling us anything but what he is thinking. If the POV remains in both first person from Grace, and third omniscient focused (maybe it will turn out to be limited) on Simon, then we will have to decide which, if either or both, to believe and trust, since it appears that Atwood is setting us up for this conflict between the two. Nicely done.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology