Exploring the generic boundary zone: Narrative perspective in George Orwell’s ‘A hanging’ and Janette Turner Hospital’s ‘The mango tree’

In this article, I show how the ‘narratorial presence’ (our aesthetic experience of being in the story), constructed for the reader in relation to each specific story, occurs at the intersection of highly nuanced narratological structures and reading conventions. Such conventions can also shape our view of ‘borderline’ texts as either ‘story’ or ‘essay’. Drawing first on narratological features originally articulated by Franz Stanzel and Gerard Genette, this article extends these articulations to fully explore and describe the nexus between pronoun choice in short narratives and the specific and heightened effects constructed by readers – that is, narrative perspective, an aspect affecting the entire reading experience.