The most noticeable stylistic element in Holiday is voice. In this short story,
Porter employs a first person narrative, something we have not yet seen in either Porter of O’Connor’s works.
Furthermore, the voice of the first person narrator is distinctly male. Something about this voice sounds formal and Victorian, reminiscent of the narrator in Wuthering Heights. This voice ultimately serves to put distance between the narrator and his world and the world of the German immigrants. Thus, despite the narrator’s involvement with the family (pulling weeds with Hatsy etc.) he still maintains the viewpoint of an observer.
The distant viewpoint of the narrator helps to maintain the motif of silence that is so prevalent in Holiday. This motif of silence is especially prevalent with the character of Ottilie. Although the audience is compelled to feel sorry for Ottilie, we cannot evoke a sense of ethos because she does nothing to help herself and simply resigns herself to her fate. After one scene where Ottilie takes the narrator and shows him a picture of herself as a child, before she was deformed, she simply pretends as though nothing has happened between them. The author however, cannot see Ottilie in the same way as he did previously and is confused as to what this woman feels and sees and thinks in her own silent world.
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I actually thought of the narrator as female. I wonder why we thought such different things? I think I thought it was a woman narrator because the narrator has a childhood friend who is female, Louise, so I just assumed that the narrator was also a woman. It does make sense that the narrator might be a man, because the text says of Ottilie, "My sense of her realness, her humanity, this shattered being that was a woman, was so shocking to me that a howl as doglike and despairing..." (434). It seems like if the narrator was female, maybe she wouldn't have had so much of a realization that Ottilie was a woman. I am wondering if not knowing the narrator's gender makes a difference in this story. I guess it would make a difference in scenes like when the women are serving dinner to the men and when the baby is born. I also read these scenes as coming from a female narrator, I think because of the treatment of the subject, but now I am not sure if the narrator is male or female. I'll have to go back and read the story again from a male's perspective.
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