The Ultimate Safari | The Race of the Narrator

White is the publisher of the Seattle-based literary press, Scala House Press. In this essay, White argues that Gordimer’s decision not to reveal the race of the narrator in ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ resulted in the creation of a more empathetic character with whom her white American and British readers could identify.

The art of ‘‘writing in voice,’’ or ‘‘writing in character,’’ is a common literary technique that has been used by countless writers over the years. In one of literature’s most famous examples, Herman Melville adopts the persona of Ishmael, an itinerant seaman, in Moby Dick, and in two of the more popular examples from the late twentieth century, Alice Walker, in The Color Purple, adopts the voice of Celie, an uneducated, abused southern girl, and Arthur Golden writes from the perspective of a Japanese geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha.

While it...

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