imagoldfish

Buy me stuff.

Please? I want it a whole bunch. And you didn't get me anything for Christmas. And it snowed today. And I LOVE getting stuff.

Edit:
Help me with my paper! (in addition to buying me stuff)
You're smart kids. You can help me think of examples. I'm writing a paper on the possibility of collage in literature, and whether or not text can accomplish the jarring effect that a visual collage can. The problem is, the best example that I can find of this is in the English translation of a Wislawa Szymborska poem, and irritatingly enough, the effect doesn't work in the original, only in translation. I don't think this is a big problem, because I'm arguing for the possibility of such an effect, and this is an example of it (who cares about authorial intent? I mean, seriously), but it'd be nice if I could find some other examples.

So what I'm looking for is a case when you have multiple speakers in a text (poetry seems ideal for this, but it could definitely work in other genres), and when a jarring effect is accomplished because you read a line that seems totally out of whack until you realize that the speaker is in fact someone other than you thought at first.

You see this at work in Eliot, in The Wasteland, but it doesn't have the whoa! what?! effect, it just makes things complicated. I suspect that there are examples of this in Woolf or Joyce, but I don't have the texts at hand to check. I'm certain that there are other examples of this out there, and I suspect that one of you might know of a good one...

Any help is appreciated - I've got a few days to work on it. If you need further clarification, I'd be happy to go into my argument in greater detail.

If the ethics of this make you uneasy, I will say in my own defense that I don't consider this cheating in the slightest - I've come up with the argument and ideas on my own, and I'd like more examples to illustrate it. If you want to tell me your real name, I can stick you in a footnote or something, heh heh.

More Edits!
Ok, so I've received some suggestions that made me realize that I haven't been clear enough. I'm not just looking for texts with multiple narrative voices that are confusing. Equally crucial is that the confusion is RESOLVED. I'm looking for examples where a switch in narrative voice produces a jarring effect that is resolved when you realize who the speaker actually is. It's not that I'm looking for examples of multiple voices - I know plenty of those. I need moments where you're reading, the you hit a line and think "whoa, wtf?" and then think "Oh, I get it, that wasn't x speaking, it was y. Now I see the point".

I am so not cool.