Student Question
What effect does Shelley achieve by having each narrator speak in the first person?
Quick answer:
By employing first-person narrators, Shelley achieves a sense of "endistancing," where stories are relayed from one person to another, highlighting the theme of reputation versus reality. This narrative style underscores the idea that reputations are often exaggerated or fabricated, as seen with Ozymandias, whose legacy relies on self-praising documents and monuments. The first-person narration enhances the poem's exploration of the transient and fragile nature of reputation.
The use of first-person narrators is common in much poetry, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. When the poem is narrative in character, that is when the speaker is telling a story to a listener (rather than emoting or describing inner thoughts), the effect is “endistancing”. These stories are removed by at least one person from the immediate narrator. In this case, where the subject is reputation versus direct evidence of greatness, the endistancing helps make the point that there is always an element of exaggeration, and even falsehood, in one’s reputation. Ozymandias the historical figure is a perfect example: everything we know about the Egyptian king and his accomplishments comes from documents of self-praise or forced loyalty, stories of his deeds carved on monoliths, etc. Shelley is saying “Reputation is a story someone made up.” The transience and fragility of such reputation is...
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of course depicted in this poem, this “story” passed down from narrator to narrator, and (now, as a much anthologized poem) passed down to more generations. So the first-person telling augments the theme.