1st Impressions of Fat Woman Next Door...

In The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, by Michel Tremblay, the structure of the novel makes it a unique read. By creating the narration of the novel through third person omniscience, Tremblay is able to illustrate the inner thoughts of everyone in an entire neighborhood. Tremblay allows us to know the truth of the inner workings of each household allowing the audience to have a better understanding of the neighborhood than the characters do. It’s difficult to say whether the novel is better this way or if it was narrated from a more limited perspective. But while most authors who narrate their novels through third person omnipotence limit themselves to switching narratives between chapters or a small number of characters, Tremblay excesses in switching back and forth between the characters sometimes spending only a couple of pages in one narrative. I think he does this for two reasons, one he adds character and insight to everything in this one neighborhood, two it allows the reader to move from character to character in real time so we can see internally how characters react to each other, and the events that lead up to these actions. We even see the novel narrated from Duplessis’s point of view, which seems to be given narration to show how disillusioned Marie-Sylvie is about his affection towards her, regardless of the fact that she drops everything to be with Duplessis when he eats. While this structure makes Tremblay’s novel unique, I cannot figure out why paragraphs are nonexistent or why Tremblay has decided not to separate the dialogue of the characters a little better. It makes me feels as if I’m reading a novel that has not been edited by a publisher yet. While there is an obvious purpose for this lack of grammar, it takes away some of the readability I think.