The Narration in "Lynch Law" and Our Nig

In order to compare “Lynch Law” and Our Nig, I would like to use Booth’s idea of “variations of distance” (Booth 155). Both “Lynch Law” and Our Nig have an author and a narrator that are essentially the same. But the “implied dialogue among author, narrator, the other characters, and the reader” is different (Booth 155).
Ida Wells-Barnett of “Lynch Law” is distant from the characters and close to the reader. Wells-Barnett is distant from the characters because she is reporting on activities and commenting on their implication. The majority of her rhetoric is synthesis of what she sees and what is in the past and her opinion on it. She uses her writing to sway the reader. She is not directly interacting with the people that she is discussing, those that lynch or are lynched. But, she is directly interacting with her audience, such as when she says “our watchword has been “the land of the free and the home of the brave” (Wells-Barnett Paragraph 13). She includes the audience in “our.” The only separation Wells-Barnett has from the audience is the boundary of time. Lynchings are uncommon in the lives of the current reader.
Wilson uses a different rhetorical situation in Our Nig. She has a close relationship with the characters in the story because of her direct interaction with them. The chapter titles, such as “Mag Smith, My Mother” (Wilson 1) and “My Father’s Death” (Wilson 14), reveal this closeness with the characters. Wilson shares the separation with the audience that Wells-Barnett has because of time. But, she has an additional level of separation because of what Booth calls “differences of social class or conventions of speech or dress” (Booth 156). She is in a lower social class than the reader because ideally in the modern world the social class that she was a part of doesn’t exist anymore. Also, the patois that she uses separates her from the audience.
These differences in rhetorical situation are interesting because they are applied to two pieces of documentary literature that are from a similar time period with similar purposes. They are also both written by women, in a time where female writers were more uncommon, but they have different effects. In “Lynch Law,” the tone is very harsh at times. Wells-Barnett reprimands the reader almost for not acting and for allowing such things to happen. She is very critical of America’s inability to control its own people. Our Nig is more subtly critical, though. It starts from the perspective of a child, and it certainly doesn’t fail to illustrate the unfairness of the servitude that Frado experiences, but it allows the reader to come to their own conclusion.
So, based on these two peices, a close relationship with the reader forces the author to directly appeal to the reader for her purpose, while a close relationship with the characters may cause a more varied response from the readers because they come to their own conclusions.