Essay Questions

Unlike the novel, the film adaptation is presented in a straightforward linear chronological timeline. What does the novel gain with its more complex non-linear approach to time?

In the film version—as in any story in which the narrative is presented chronologically—the basic storytelling structure is limited to a series of cause-and-effect linkages. What happens thirty minutes into a movie is utterly dependent upon what has taken place the previous twenty-nine. While this logical progress facilitates the ability to follow the story without complications, it simultaneously creates a superficial relationship between the audience and the characters. By structuring the novel with a fluid chronology that leaps both forward and backward in time to present characters at various stages of development and knowledge, readers are afforded the ability to develop a much richer connection with the characters through the addition of dramatic irony (knowing things that the characters don’t) and being presented with versions of the same event which conflict with another due to lapses in important information being available at certain times.

Relative to this conceptualization of the novel as a complex interweaving of time and incident, how is Miss Brodie portrayed as a failed storyteller?

In a way, Miss Jean Brodie is very much a doppelganger for her creator, author Muriel Spark. It is Spark who is pulling the strings of this intricate web of various characters engaging in certain actions at multiple points in the chronology and it is Spark who manages to make it all come together in the end the way she desires. Jean Brodie attempts to do much the same thing with the exact same people by exploiting her students to behave in ways designed to suit her purposes. The difference, of course, is that despite her best effort things do not come together in the way the way she desires. In fact, everything falls miserably apart in a way that strongly suggests the author’s message is that successful plotting only occurs in fiction and not real life. Due in no small part, no doubt, to the fact that most plots are dependent upon a perfect domino-like stringing together of chronological cause-and-effect, allowing little breathing room for irony and conflict.

What is the persistent structural irony of the novel concerning Sandy Stranger’s eyes?

The very first mention of eyes of anyone in the book occurs mere paragraphs into the narrator and when it comes, the reference to her “small, almost nonexistent, eyes” is presented as her defining characteristic. Unless one is looking for it specifically, it is very easy to overlook the fact that as the narrative progresses, the number of additional references to Sandy’s eyes become almost too numerous to count. And always, every time, the reader is reminded of how that singular characteristic of her eyes being unusually small: “her little screwed-up eyes…her tiny eyes…little pig-like eyes…her little faint eyes.” On rare occasions, to this recurring reference is appended a commentary about either her Sandy herself or the object of her vision: “Sandy looked at her distastefully through her little eyes…Sandy looked at it with her tiny eyes which it was astonishing that anyone could trust…the headmistress said to this rather difficult old girl with the abnormally small eyes.” The great structural irony at play here (and obviously being played with by the author) is that despite the novel being an ensemble piece featuring a large cast of character that is related in the third person omniscient point-of-view, the story of Miss Jean Brodie is quite subtly but clearly being filtered through the surprising wide vision of Sandy Stranger.