Points of View and Narrative Voices in Salomon Rushdy’s Story “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain”

The postmodern tendency of plurality has caused authors’ habit to delegate the narrator’s duties to characters and to readers in order to let the readers to decide on the meaning of the narration themselves according to their likeness. Salomon Rushdy has provided several versions of opinions by using different narrative voices. The first thing a reader finds is the use of different font to reflect the public opinion and fluctuations among direct and indirect, and free indirect, and inner speeches. After the author’s narration “But, on his first arrival at court (…) he bowed (…)” (which is narrated as if from Columbus’s point of view) sneering gossip of somebody else enters: “These unspeakable foreigners!”, and the narrator follows till people interrupt him or Columbus says something in the direct speech: “‘The search for money and patronage’, Columbus says, ‘is not so different from the quest for love’.” …