The Author's Voice Between Journalism and Prose

Tom Junod's detailed Esquire feature about the television personality Fred Rogers with the title "The Definitive Mr. Rogers Profile: Can You Say Hero?" is basically a fairytale on the very border between journalism and literature. Junod skilfully makes use of a whole stylistic concept to tell his complex story, which is set on various time levels and incorporates many personalities and happenings around Fred Rogers, whose profile is sharpened and at the same time blurred through some kind of sanctification with every paragraph. While the reader learns more about the man with every depicted situation, every revelation, the question arises: Can such a good being exist?

Junod's voice is that of a storyteller. I'd even like to go so far and call his story a fairytale, presented in a way you'd talk to children, although its contents are rather bittersweet. The most obvious indication for that can be found in the repeated introductory term "Once upon a time". The fact that not every paragraph begins with these words and that there is point in the story, where the pattern is ironically commented on (just before the school shooting) makes them even more credible and serious. Big parts of the story use a diction which mimics the choice of words you would find in a TV show adapted to children (such as Mr Rogers' Neighborhood): "Thunderstruck means that you can't talk, because something has happened that's as sudden and as miraculous and maybe as scary as a bolt of lightning (…)". "Architects are people who create big things from the little designs they draw on pieces of paper."

The story is narrated from an omniscient perspective. The narrator knows about the outcome and sentences like "And that's how the chapter began" can be read as hints to what will follow. Another proof for how well the stylistic concept of the story is thought-out can be found in the fact that the author (or narrator) doesn't reveal Rogers' color blindness to the reader until near the end of the text. He deliberately repeats the various colors of Rogers' clothes, the "dark socks", the always "white or light blue" shirt several times, all for the sake of a late and well placed resolution. This consciousness of stylistic effects to me seems more of a characteristic of top-class magazine journalism than of a freely flowing literary voice. A sentence like "and then off he went, this ecstatic ascetic, to take a proud piss in his corner of heaven" is on the other hand so poetic and beautiful that I one cannot ignore the powerful literary voice which is an equally important part of the text as style and intelligent turns.

P.S. Because of my German origin I am probably the only one in this class who hadn't heard of Mr. Rogers ever before reading this feature. I apologize in advance in case I got anything about him and his show really wrong.