Sometimes multiple Voices maybe used with their corressponding Perspectives, this is often used to create greater and more varied insights into their subject matter.
How Multiple Voices are used
Sometimes multiple voices may be used to amplify one voice, often one the author agrees with, and marginalise another.
E.g. a Documentry relegates an expert who holds an opposing view point to the end and gives them less time to express their Perspective. Or then Overwhelm their voice through 3 other experts who support the author/director.
Example: Multiple Voices in Interpretive Text
Tyalor Nicole Rogers includes Multiple Voices in her opinion piece ’Scientists blast Jonathan Franzen’s “climate doomist)” opinion column as “the worst piece on climate change”’, published in Business Insider in 2019. Rogers reports on the furore created when US journalist and author Jonathan Franzen published his eassy ‘What if We stopped pretending?’, in which he claimed that there is no point trying to stop cliamte change because environmental destruction is inevitable. The voices included in Rogers’ piece - specifically those of Franzen, John Upton and Rogers herself - represent various perspectives on climate change.
”It’s hard to imagine major outlets publishing essays declaring efforts to reduce provery hopeless. Or telling cancer partients to just give up,”, John Upton, an editor at Climate Central, wrote on Twitter. ”Yet this Climate Doomist trope flourishes - penned, best I can tell, exclusively by older, comfy white men.”
The Scientific Consensus is that reducing emissions can still slow climate change. AN October report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change found that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial average temperatures could reduce the frequency of the msot dangerous climate events, such as severe drought and extreme heat.
Franzen disagreed with the notion.
”If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth - massive crop failtures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought,” Frzen wrote in The New Yorker. “If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guarrenteed to witness it.”
Example: The Bone Sparrow - Zana Fraillon
In her novel The Bone Sparrow, Zana Fraillon tells the story of Subhi, a young boy who was born in an Australian detention centre. The novel represents the experience of children in detention centres by giving them, and asylum seekers more widely, a voice. Through the choice of narrator, Fraillon develops a child’s naive voice.
Maá tells me never to look to closely at the food, and whenever I find flies or worms, she says I’m extra lucky because they give me protein. Once I even found a human tooth in my rice. ‘Hey, Maá, is this lucky to?’ I asked, and Maá looked at it and said, ‘If you needing tooth’. She laughed a long time at her own joke. Longer than it was really worth in my opinion.
Subhi Voices the experience of refugees, constructing humour and warmth despite the harsh conditions. This is the dominant Voice as readers follow Subhi’s version of events. The novel also Voices concerns about mental health issues and the lack of support available in rural Australia. One way it does this is by including Multiple Voices, such as those of Maá (a mother) and the Jackets, the guards at the centre.
They say it was Eli’s fault. They say he started all the craziness. But he was just a kid. He didn’t want to be grown yet. They are saying Eli was on the roof. That he was angry. They are saying he went for Beaver. That he fell. That beaver tried to save him. They are saying…
In this example, the voice of the Jackets is conveyed as insistent and frightening through Subhi’s repetition of the pronoun ‘they’, which constructs them as the enemy. Note that the voice is conveyed through narratorial comment. not direct speech. This is an example of including other people’s Voices indirectly with paraphrase.