People-watching is fun.
Entertaining. “Alice Weir” reminded me of being out in public and simply
observing the people passing by with their day-to-day routine and habits. The
piece begins with the idea that “as the train stops, the story should begin”;
everyone has a story, why they’re going where they are going and from where
have they come. In this train station, it feels like the narrators may even be
inventing stories for all of the people they observe.
The biggest question for me is who
the narrators are. A group of people? Do they know Alice Weir, or are she and
even her name someone for whom they have made up a story? The narrators, in my
opinion, are indeed a group of people, although they could also include the
reader, since it seems that without physically moving we are able to leave the
train station with Alice and venture outside to see a family getting out of a
cab. However, it seems that the narrators get fed up with Alice and her
dilly-dallying on the sidewalk, just like the fellow passengers whom she is
blocking, and their attention diverts to said family.
By the time they get bored with this
family, their attention reverts to Alice who is gone. But they must go on this
people-watching excursion often, because they know that since it’s only Monday,
“[s]he’ll be back”.
At this point in my reading, I
believe the people-watchers are all-seeing and include the reader. It’s like
panning in and out of scenes during a movie, following the action. So, I
conclude, that people-watching is justified because it is simply like watching
a movie.
I agree with you that I believe the narrator is people watching. Therefore, I think the "we" refers to the audience AND the narrator. As the reader, we are also in the same place of the narrator because the narrator is in the scene people-watching, but as readers, we are also getting the scene painted for us, therefore making us people watchers too. I think it's really neat the way this passage works.
ReplyDeleteI also thought about people watching after reading this piece. I think it's a realistic situation in that the speaker is saying what everyone else is probably thinking. I also like how the speaker is distracted by the family because when people watch other people, they can often be distracted by other things around them. I like the idea that the reader is grouped into the "we" because that makes the audience feel like an even bigger part of the story.
ReplyDeletePeople watching was something that stood out to me in this piece as well. And I also had many questions. The whole piece essentially centers around people-watching and I think it's really intriguing. Everyone people watches but this particular person is so fond of this one Alice Weir and we don't seem to know why. She didn't do anything that should've caught his attention. Also the 'we' in this situation. The speaker may just think that everyone else is watching her...or maybe something happened in the past for her to garner all this attention.
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