Robert Frost's dramatic monologue : the two sides of the narrative in "A Servant to Servants"

Abstract

The structuralist-inspired development of narrative theories in France from the late 1960s onward has spawned a whole host of opportunities to explore the way narratives function. This is precisely what Gerald Prince undertakes in his Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative, in which he delineates the mutual relationship between the narrator and the narratee as two of the most important constituents in any narrative. This framework is useful for the study of Robert Frost's narrative poetry, which comprised a large part of his oeuvre at a time when the form had become marginalized due to conforming to the poetic conventions that modernism tended to undermine. This research explores Frost's modernist take on this conventional genre through a narratological study of his poem “A Servant to Servants.”