By: Connor Bjotvedt
Maurice Manning’s The Common Man presents itself, unapologetically, as Manning’s
own, idealized, historical narrative of the Appalachian landscape and its inhabitants. Manning
dedicates the collection, “. . . to the memory of [his] grandmothers, who told [him] stories, and to
the Kentucky mountains, which made those stories happen.” Through the specificity of person
and place found within the dedication, Manning conveys his expectation for the reader to
understand the proceeding work as a loving homage to the world that was constructed for him as
a child. Manning implies that the focus of the work is to construct a sensationalized narrative
comparable to his grandmothers’ stories. To fulfill this intention, the poems within the collection
consist of developmental images of the Appalachian landscape and its people and to further
parallel the storyteller role they are communicated to the reader through a first-person speaker.
Ultimately, the goal behind the collection is to present the reader with the scenes and characters
that comprise a contrived version of the Appalachian landscape which attempts to reexplore the
examples of cultural narrative that Manning was presented with in his grandmothers’ stories.
Without doubt, Maurice Manning’s focus within The Common Man is to present the reader with
his personal understanding of the culture of Appalachia, which he demonstrates through a string
of emblematic narratives which are filtered to the reader through the collection’s biased, first-
person speaker.
Finding the truth or the complete truth within a work of literature forces the reader to
look beyond the narrator and the narrative to imagine the larger landscape and its themes which
the speaker or narrative is unable to fully present the reader. The speaker and the narrative’s
inability to fully explore the greater landscape and its populations is not because the two are
apathetic to do so but it is because the complete exploration of every detail and person present in
the landscape is not conducive to the formation of purposeful narrative. A narrative that doddles
and touches on every facet of the world that it creates does not allow the work to formally
progress through its narrative arc. So, the work, to progress through its narrative arc, must form
an operating bias which it will use to deem what information is appropriate or what contributes
purposefully towards the work’s conclusion. In the case of The Common Man Manning chooses
his speaker to inhabit the role of the collection’s operating bias.
Manning selects his speaker to embody the work’s bias and because of this, the poems
within the collection are presented to the reader as a litany of personal stories about Appalachia.
The stories provide the reader with a single perspective and a single personal history but do not
present the reader with a culturally accurate depiction of Appalachia. Realistically, the poems are
meant to explore Manning’s emblematic Appalachia—Manning’s pure Appalachia. The poems
are meant to showcase the humorous or the sophomoric and are meant to entertain the reader—
not educate the reader. Manning defends this reading through his admission that the work is
meant to pay homage to his grandmothers’ stories and defends the speaker’s embodiment of the
work’s operating bias via his attempt to emulate his grandmothers’ original storyteller roles.
Manning’s desire to pay homage to his grandmothers, and to the Appalachian people,
forces The Common Man to imply that it is a complete rendition of the two. The collection, via
this implication, is therefore ushered to claim that the poems found within it will communicate
the objective characteristics of Appalachia. However, this blanketed desire to claim that the
collection represents an objective image of Appalachia leads it towards the formation of a biased,
strategic, discretion within its poems. The utilization of this strategic discretion ultimately allows
the speaker to emphasize the material which he finds meaningful or otherwise imperative to
understand the specific cultural narrative which he subjectively constructs throughout the course
of the collection.
The speaker abuses the reader’s trust to achieve his goal of accuracy within the
collection’s personalized rendition of Appalachia. The sidelined support he receives from his
selection as the collection’s bias allows the speaker to abuse his perspective and submit to the
reader a selection of embellished narratives which he believes best represent his version of
Appalachia. The speaker designs the collection around the qualities of Appalachian life which he
believes best represent the culture and history that he wants to present and not pieces which
represent the true history of Appalachia. To look briefly at a similar piece of literature, the novel,
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, presents the reader with a biased narrative similar to
The Common Man. The novel’s speaker Nick Carraway presents the reader with his personal
accounts and memories to elegize the life of James Gatz and explore the social attitudes of New
York City during the 1920’s. To achieve these goals Carraway provides the reader with his
version of events and abuses the reader’s trust by his attempt to retell the story as accurately as
possible.
The Great Gatsby begins with a chapter length introduction of the 1920’s by Nick
Carraway. Yet before he begins discussing the culture, the history, or even the novel’s narrative,
he confronts the reader with a short, rhetorical, observation of his own bias. The bias he
describes will both influence the body of the novel and the novel’s end by controlling the novel’s
moral opinion and the dissemination information within the novel. In the introduction: Carraway
identifies himself as the speaker of the novel, he explains the bias that he will demonstrate in the
novel, and then admits to the reader that the bias, which he will employ, has a personal, moral,
limit. Carraway seeks to demonstrate to the reader that he can be trusted as a reliable source of
information within the novel. Carraway, through his direct admission of his perspective’s
constraints, wants the reader to feel that they are in no way being led unfairly by him to biased
conclusions within the novel, but what he proves is the opposite. Carraway begins,
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that
I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that
all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a
reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran
bores.
. . . and, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it
has a limit. (Fitzgerald 1)
In this excerpt, the reader learns of Carraway’s upbringing and the situational advice that
his father gave to him when he was a younger man, “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . .
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Through this introduction, Carraway states his lifelong desire to remain as impartial as possible
as long as it concerns any interpretation or critique of other people. Carraway admits to
the reader that he abstains from all “judgments” in life and because of this he believes that he will
not contribute as an influencing factor over the reader’s interpretation of the novel’s characters in
any way. Ultimately, Carraway uses this passage to formally try and demonstrate to the reader
that he will remain as unbiased as possible until the events or circumstances approach his vague
moral limit.
By openly discussing his perspective’s constraints and his role in the novel, Carraway
presents the reader with the rules of the narrative. These rules of the narrative dictate how the
narrative of the novel will unfold and how his bias will impact the narrative. Christopher
Castellani, in his book The Art of Perspective, refers to these rules as the narrative strategy of
the novel and defines the term as such:
Fiction writers are taught that the first pages of a novel or short story serve as a
contract . . . this so-called contract with the reader [is] the author’s attempt to
establish narrative strategy . . . By narrative strategy I mean the set of organizing
principles that (in)form how the author is telling the story. (Castellani 16)
As Castellani explains, narrative strategy in fiction and in poetry informs the reader on
how they should interpret character, scene, and morality within the text. These “organizing
principles that (in)form how the author [tells] the story” (16) inevitably inform the reader on how
to read the story. Through Carraway’s personal introduction he shows that he would like the
reader to understand that he is an unbiased source of information, in all but rare occasions. He
would like to show that he will maintain his objective gaze until his moral limits are reached. In
his own way, Carraway would like to present himself definitively as a reliable narrator and prove
that The Great Gatsby’s narrative is being judged impartially, yet, he confirms the opposite. He
definitively proves to the reader that the novel’s actions will be judged first by Carraway’s vague
personal standards and then allowed to be judged by the reader. Carraway’s opening soliloquy
proves that The Great Gatsby has a structured, biased, filter which it will maintain for the whole
of the novel as long as Carraway is narrating. Through his own admission Carraway confirms to
the reader that his perspective will embody the novel’s operating bias which forces him
wholeheartedly into the role of the unreliable narrator and forces the novel into the realm of
homage or memoriam.
Through his own admission Carraway voids the possibility for The Great Gatsby’s
narrative to be interpreted in any way as accurate and that instead the narrative should be seen as
a biased recount of Carraway’s memories. Carraway’s choice to openly admit his operating bias
nullifies the possibility for the text to be taken as an honorable approach towards accurately
conveying the social dilemmas of the 1920’s and instead supplants it with his morally ambiguous
discussion of his own opinions of the social scene at the time. The Great Gatsby presents the
novel’s narrative strategy through Carraway’s opening soliloquy and proves to the reader on the
first page of the novel that what they are about to read should be taken with a grain of salt. The
novel’s introduction demonstrates to the reader that under no circumstance should the novel’s
narrative be considered an accurate recount of the life of James Gatz or an objective glimpse of
the high society of the 1920’s. Ultimately, Carraway’s introduction leads the reader to understand
the novel as a piece of satire or memoriam which does not present the reader with an accurate,
objective, depiction of anything.
Much like Fitzgerald, Manning wastes no time in unwrapping the mysteries of his
narrative strategy as he discusses them on the first page of his book. The Common Man begins
with the poem “Moonshine” which outlines the narrative strategy which it will use to control the
development of the larger narrative within the collection. This poem acts as The Common Man’s
opening soliloquy. The poem presents the reader with the speaker’s moment of epiphany. The
speaker realizes within the poem the implication of his perspective within the landscape and
within the larger narrative of Appalachia. This epiphany leads the speaker to admit his desire to
tell his story within the poem and the collection. Thus, like Carraway’s soliloquy, this poem
stands to define the collection as the platform from which the speaker will present the reader
with his story.
This poem presents the reader with the parameters of the collection’s operating bias,
which are: that the speaker will retell the stories in which he believes himself to be the center of
and that he will, throughout the course of the collection, showcase all the Appalachian people
and their collective history through generalized stories and attempts at presenting genuine
experiences to the reader. The poem, in partialness, “Moonshine,”
The older boy said, Take ye a slash
o’ this – hit’ll make yore sticker peck out –
which would have been a more profound
effect than putting hair on my chest,
to which I was already accustomed.
Proverbially, of course, he was right.
I took a slash, another, and then
I felt an impassioned swelling, though
between my ears, as they say, a hot
illumination in my brain.
The shine had not been cut; full of
the moon it was for sure. I knew
the mountain country it came from –
my family’s section, on Little Goose.
A distant cousin would have been proud
to know another cousin was drinking
what might as well be blood, at least
the bonds that come with blood,
[. . .]
This was the first time I heard the story
I was born to tell, the first I knew
that I was in the story, too. (Manning 1-2)
The poem’s beginning five couplets introduce the reader to the character of the speaker
and to the climate from which the speaker is writing. The speaker experiences a drunken night
but has been given a great “impassioned swelling . . . / a hot / illumination in [his] brain” rather
than the feeling of drunkenness. The speaker creates the genesis moment for the collection—he
describes the moment of realization that his life and the life of those around him needs to be
chronicled. He, like Carraway in his opening, presents the reader with the formation of his
perspective and the collection’s operating bias.
“The older boy said, Take ye a slash,” Manning, in this opening line forms the character
of the speaker. He is a man young enough to have a senior but old enough to already have hair on
his chest, “. . . hair on my chest, / to which I was already accustomed.” The speaker is a young
man who understands cultural idiom. He is a young man who is significantly tied to the
landscape,
[. . .] I knew
the mountain country it came from –
my family’s section, on Little Goose.
A distant cousin would have been proud
to know another cousin was drinking
what might as well be blood, at least
the bonds that come with blood,
Manning’s speaker is a man of the people and a man of the land and this realization leads
him towards the epiphany that coalesces in the final two couplets, “This was the first time I heard
the story / I was born to tell, the first I knew / that I was in the story, too.”
Manning’s speaker in “Moonshine” defines the collection by the operating bias which he
will use to craft its larger narrative, “I heard the story / I was born to tell.” Manning’s speaker
defines the collection by his attempt to tell his story, and the story of those around him, as
accurately as possible. Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “The Fish” encounters a similar equation
and details her experience in an interview:
That’s exactly how it happened,” Elizabeth Bishop said nearly thirty
years after her poem “The Fish” was written. “I did catch it just as the poem says.
That was in 1938. Oh, but I did change one thing; the poem says he had five
hooks hanging from his mouth, but actually he only had three. I think it improved
the poem when I made that change. (Doty 13)
Bishop determined that her intention behind writing “The Fish” was to describe
the narrative “exactly” as it presented itself to her. She allowed the poem to take on embellishment
and allowed the piece to become emblematic of the scene. Bishop allowed herself to tell the
better story or the “improved” story. She allowed herself to create the image she wanted to see
and the image that she wanted the reader to see. When Manning’s “Moonshine” is paralleled
with Bishop’s interview the comparison seems to rightfully lean towards understanding the
narrative presented in “Moonshine” as a work of embellishment. The interview suggests the
possibility that Manning’s speaker’s “hot illumination” could have come as an afterthought long
after his drunkenness had left him and armed with this interpretation it stands to reason then that
the speaker could have fabricated the whole experience during the act of writing the poem.
The speaker needed to present this exact scene to the reader. The speaker needed to
present an emblematic narrative which would provide the reader with the correct emotional
connection to and understanding of the source material. The speaker needed to present this
choreographed scene as a factual event, and so he did. The speaker wanted a piece that would
justify his perspective within the collection and would ingrain the reader with a sense of regional
culture. The speaker wanted a piece that would demonstrate his bias and his reason for his bias.
The speaker wanted a piece that would show the reader the beginning of the story that he is
going to tell.
The intention behind “Moonshine” is to portray the speaker’s epiphany as a genuine
event but realistically the piece is meant to, like in Bishop’s case, present the reader with the
“improved” story—the story that is emblematic of what the speaker wants the piece to stand for.
Therefore, the true intention of the poem, like Carraway’s soliloquy, is to introduce the reader to
the speaker and provide the reader with the necessary tools to understand the collection’s
emerging narrative strategy.
“Moonshine” conveys The Common Man’s narrative strategy so effectively that the rest
of the poems within the collection become rather formulaic. Retrospectively, the poem seems
little more than the speaker’s introduction to his world and functionally it proves to be little more
than that. The poem creates the expectation that the whole of Appalachia will be conveyed to the
reader through the speaker and that he, through the course of crafting the other poems in the
collection, will provide the necessary commentary and explanation to justify the alternative
narrative’s inclusion within his narrative. “Moonshine” sets the reader up to understand that the
proceeding poems within the collection will be functionally redundant and only serve as vehicles
to present the narrative that the speaker wants to present.
The poem “The Mute,” which directly follows “Moonshine,” demonstrates the
collection’s emerging trend of functionally redundant narratives. “The Mute” details the lives of
two brothers living up in a “holler” and then details the relationship the speaker has with these
two brothers. The piece seeks to present a genuine scene of Appalachian life to the reader but
functionally the piece is little more than a brief narrative which is subverted by the speaker.
Ultimately, “The Mute” stands as the beginning of the speaker’s self-domination over the
collection and the Appalachian narrative that he is trying to present. The poem, in partialness,
“The Mute,”
If you go up in the holler far
enough you’ll spy a little house
half-hidden in the trees. It’s dark
up there all day and when the night
comes down it’s darker yet. There’s two
old brothers living in that house
and the younger one is fatter than
a tick with lies and sassy tales
[. . .]
Because I jinxed him! he told me one day
when I asked why I’d never heard
the older brother speak. How long
has he been jinxed? I asked. Lord, years!
[. . .]
Now remember what I said – this man
is fatter than a junebug with lies
and he can spread them pretty thick,
though I’ve never minded listening.
Many a time I’ve stopped up there
to visit and every time it seems
the younger brother has just been waiting.
What’s the good word? he always asks.
Yes, many a time I’ve stopped up there, (Manning 3-6)
“The Mute,” when presented in full, details the backstory of two brothers and their lives
in an Appalachian holler. The piece presents the reader with a humorous glance into the lives of
people living in Appalachian communities and details odd quirks of character and the realities of
living in an impoverished area. The above, excerpted, sections of “The Mute” demonstrates the
three turns within the original poem and in rendition seeks to present a poem similar to the
original.
“The Mute” begins with the lines, “If you go up in the holler far / enough you’ll spy a
little house / half-hidden in the trees” which is not a far cry different from the opening couplet of
the previous poem “Moonshine,” “The older boy said, Take ye a slash / o’ this – hit’ll make yore
sticker peck out.” The two poems share a similar thematic opening because both poems seek to
set a choreographed path for their narratives to follow. The two poems deal with, what the
speaker believes to be, specific emblematic examples of Appalachian life: the first, a night of
drinking and wild abandonment and the second, the actual day to day presentation of oneself
within the community. These poems present the reader with character driven pieces that seek to
demonstrate the faculties and possibilities of people found within the Appalachian landscape.
These poems seek to present genuine experiences to the reader, however, what they truly
represent is the confirmation of the collection’s structured bias. The speaker admits at the end of
the poem,
Now remember what I said – this man
is fatter than a junebug with lies
and he can spread them pretty thick,
though I’ve never minded listening.
[. . .]
Many a time I’ve stopped up there
[. . .]
Yes, many a time I’ve stopped up there,
Through the speaker’s own admission, he proves to the reader that this story was selected
by him because of his own enjoyment of the characters within the story, “I’ve never minded
listening /. . .Yes, many a time I’ve stopped up there.” The speaker admits that the inclusion of
the brothers’ narrative is not meant to imply that they contribute to a greater theme or image of
Appalachia but that they were selected to provide a brief glimpse into the speaker’s Appalachia.
Ultimately, the speaker uses this story of the two brothers to demonstrate the narrative control
that he maintains over the developing collection and forces the poem “The Mute” to identify
as the first working model of the narrative strategy that he presented to the reader in “Moonshine.”
“The Mute” informs the reader of how the speaker’s operating bias will determine which
stories to present to the reader later within the collection. As well, the speaker demonstrates that
he is not concerned with the perspective of the other people within the landscape or within the
collection but that he is concerned with how accurately he can depict them and himself. The
speaker displays to the reader that the collection will represent the stories which he finds
amusing or entertaining and formally reveals that poems within the collection will not
reconstruct an objective depiction of Appalachia but that they will reconstruct his contrived
version of Appalachia.
The speaker confirms his control over the collection’s operating bias within this piece. He
indicates that the goal behind his narrative strategy is not to present a factual catalogue of
Appalachia but that he wants to present his contrived, choreographed, version of the place. The
speaker proves to the reader that the stories which comprise the collection will be functionally
redundant in the way that they will serve no greater purpose in defining any physical landscape
but rather they will construct the landscape that the speaker wants to present to the reader. This
piece demonstrates to the reader that the speaker is going to seek out the narratives which he
believes to be emblematic in defining his Appalachia but not narratives which represent the
factual Appalachia. The speaker reveals that he is choosing to showcase the two brothers, and the
night of drinking in the poem “Moonshine,” because they provide the correct defining factors of
Appalachia that the speaker wants to present. The two poems, “The Mute” and “Moonshine”
provide the reader with a clear formation and demonstration of the collection’s narrative strategy
and allow the speaker to form the foundation for the larger landscape to come.
The collection uses the poems “The Mute” and “Moonshine” to establish its narrative
strategy and to define the work as a biased reconstruction of Appalachia. The speaker emerges in
the two pieces as the narrator to the collection and the collection is confirmed to be little more
than a compilation of the speaker’s memories. The two pieces ultimately stand out as
demonstrations to the reader that the speaker is an external voyeur within the landscape and that
his depictions of Appalachia are entirely self-serving and are not meant to convey an accurate
rendition of the place or its people. Christopher Castellani discusses how this atmosphere effects
the later poems in the collection in the early pages of his book The Art of Perspective:
Every narrator becomes the story, and the story becomes him. It is only and
always his. This is what we mean when we say that the story is from
“Christopher’s perspective.” We mean that what “really happened” to the other
characters, especially but not exclusively in fiction, is Christopher’s unique
construction, filtered and shaped by his experience, sensibility, and faculty with
language and insight. (Castellani 8)
Castellani describes the act of constructing a narrator within this quote. He describes the
act as being the inherent definition by which the work will be judged, “This is what we mean
when we say that the story is from “Christopher’s perspective.”’ Castellani explains that all
narratives are defined by their speaker’s “unique . . . experience, sensibility, and faculty” and that
the work can never escape the speaker’s bias or their presence, “Every narrator becomes the
story, and the story becomes him. It is only and always his.” Through this quote Castellani
explains that any piece of literature which maintains a narrator’s perspective will always be
defined by their narrative bias. So, by definition, The Common Man will always be defined by
the speaker’s bias and will never be able to represent an objective reconstruction of Appalachia.
Castellani’s discussion of the inherent bias hidden within narration perfectly describes the
remaining 90 pages of The Common Man. As the collection progresses towards its end, the
reader is treated to more and more images and stories of Appalachia life and are continually t
reated to the speaker’s unique perspective and understanding of those events. The speaker uses
the rest of the collection to reveal the stories which continually justify and represent his
understanding of Appalachia and its people: the speaker retells stories from his childhood, stories
from what could be considered the present day, and then stories which have no direct point on
the timeline but are considered by the speaker to be emblematic, timeless, depictions of
Appalachia.
The Common Man parades itself as a personal history of Appalachia and does little in the
way to subvert the speaker to create a balance within the work. Without a competing perspective
in the work each poem simply compounds onto the speaker’s perspective which compounds onto
the collection’s larger narrative. The speaker offers no alternative narratives or secondary
perspectives within the collection which leaves the reader to wallow in the speaker’s biased
depiction of Appalachia. The speaker repeats this formulaic approach of conveying his history of
Appalachia in every poem until the collection’s final poem wherein he works to bookend the
collection by reiterating the justification he originally gave for his perspective in the collection in
the poem “Moonshine”.
The final poem, “The Common Man,” reads as a part two to the collection’s opening
poem “Moonshine.” The speaker once again introduces himself to the reader and interjects what
the speaker would consider to be definitive proof that the narrative of Appalachia was his to tell.
The speaker redresses the information which he provided within the collection’s opening poem
and uses this piece to comfortably end the collection. The speaker, by the poem’s end,
definitively proves to the reader that it was his bias that shaped the collection and defines the
collection’s version of Appalachia as a reconstruction of myth and stories. The poem, in
partialness, “The Common Man,”
Well, it’s me, this time; I’m sitting here
in a farmhouse. Things have happened here,
besides the sun and chimney smoke,
but most of the time it’s pretty quiet.
[. . .]
I suppose I’m common enough. I come
from this dirt, from dark Kentucky ground
steeped in blood and steep beneath
my feet. All my life, it’s always up
and down. I know the lay of the land,
and like any rude provincial man,
I am content with what I know.
[. . .]
That’s something to ponder, thinking long,
not hard or deep, but long, in time
and distance – I do it all the time,
though slowly, and as you can see,
I haven’t gotten very far!
Aw shucks, I’ve barely ever left
the country, hardly gone beyond
the hill, because I like it here. [. . .] (Manning 93-94)
The speaker subverts the collection’s formulaic narrative strategy within the first couplet,
“Well, it’s me, this time; I’m sitting here / in a farmhouse.” The speaker reveals that the subject
of this poem will finally be a diagnosis of himself rather than a diagnosis of the life and
landscape around him. The speaker puts himself under his own lens in this piece. The speaker
abandons his narrative strategy and abandons his domineering perspective in the work. The
speaker for the first time makes himself the subject.
The speaker makes himself the subject to finalize his depiction of Appalachia and to once
more defend his perspective within the collection. The speaker begins,
I suppose I’m common enough. I come
from this dirt, from dark Kentucky ground
steeped in blood and steep beneath
my feet.
The speaker works to rejoin the landscape that he lorded over and biasedly reconstructed
throughout the course of the collection, “I suppose I’m common enough. I come / from this dirt,
from dark Kentucky ground.” The speaker once again tries to claim that he is an appropriate
candidate to convey the narrative that he has conveyed. The speaker works to thematically
reiterate the poem “Moonshine” and reassert to the reader that he is a perspective engrained
within the landscape, “I come / from this dirt, from dark Kentucky ground / steeped in blood and
steep beneath / my feet.” Ultimately, this poem stands as the speaker’s last attempt to defend
himself and the bias that he used to reconstruct his version of Appalachia.
The speaker continues,
I am content with what I know.
[. . .]
I haven’t gotten very far!
Aw shucks, I’ve barely ever left
the country, hardly gone beyond
the hill, because I like it here. [. . .]
The line, “I am content with what I know” comes as a mid-point of sorts within the non-
excerpted poem. The line reads as the opening to the speaker’s final admission of his bias. The
line begins a snowball effect within the poem which eventually settles on the final two couplets
of the excerpted section, “Aw shucks, I’ve barely ever left / the country, hardly gone beyond / the
hill, because I like it here.” The speaker incriminates himself within this section of the poem; he
proves to the reader that it was his intention to describe the place that he “likes” and the place
that he cannot mentally forgo. In this section, the speaker confirms that he has, throughout the
course of crafting his narrative, created a biased rendition of Appalachia and its people and has in
no way tried to present an objective depiction of the place. The speaker erases any trust that the
reader may have had left within this implication of himself and ultimately leaves “The Common
Man” to stand as the speaker’s last confirmation that The Common Man was written to reexplore
memories and present the reader with a narrative that is emblematic of his Appalachia rather than
piece concerned with the factual history of Appalachia.
Manning’s speaker in The Common Man presents a “fully-known world devoid of
mystery” (Boswell 13) as Robert Boswell would put it; the speaker lays out the operating
parameters of the collection so effectively that the reader is not surprised by either the content of
the poems or the perspective of the speaker. Manning’s choice to utilize this atmosphere in the
collection leaves the reader stranded. The reader wonders from poem to poem guided by the
speaker and is not generally asked to interact with the scenes at hand but rather is shown the
various scenes and is expected to understand their implication towards the collection’s
conclusion. Maurice Manning uses this atmosphere in The Common Man to cheat the reader and
provide unlimited flexible and plausible context for his speaker and his poems.
Maurice Manning began his collection by stating his intent to pay homage to the memory
of his grandmothers and to the Kentucky mountains which gave life to his grandmothers’ stories.
Manning, from the onset of the collection, revealed to the reader the biased approach that he and
his speaker would take in reiterating their stories and how those stories should be perceived by
the reader. Manning did not hide behind ambiguity or work to establish his speaker as a
trustworthy source of information within the collection, but instead boldly declared the work to
be a biased, partial, reconstruction of Appalachia. Ultimately, Maurice Manning’s The Common
Man stands as a depiction of a contrived version of Appalachia and without a doubt presents the
reader with Manning’s biased understanding of its culture and history.
Connor Bjotvedt is a Graduate MFA student at Spalding University. He was awarded the Charles E. Bull for Poetry by Northern Arizona University where he received a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing. His work has appeared in Rain Taxi, Santa Fe Literary Review, Haiku Journal, 50 Haiku, and The Wayfarer.
Works Cited
Boswell, Robert. The Half-Known World: on Writing Fiction. Graywolf Press, 2008.
Castellani, Christopher. The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story. Graywolf Press, 2016.
Doty, Mark. The Art of Description: World into Word. Graywolf Press, 2010.
Fitzgerald, Francis S. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 2004.
Manning, Maurice. The Common Man. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.