Fever

Wideman’s “Fever” includes a range of narrators and frequently shifts narrative perspectives over the course of 35 distinct sections of text. These shifts use third-person perspective to describe the events of the fever and first-person perspective when the narrative shifts to Richard Allen, the story’s primary protagonist. Subsequent sections may also provide insight into Allen’s perspective, but it is ambiguous. The story portrays, for example, Dr. Rush and Master Abraham from the perspective of an observer or listener, but it is not consistently clear that it is speaking from Allen’s perspective. 

The floating narrative perspective enables Wideman to blend together fact and fiction and past and present in ways that destabilize conventional ways of recording history and claiming authority of the truth. The most telling example is toward the end of the story when the narrative jumps forward in time from the final days of the fever to the 1985 bombing of Osage Avenue in Philadelphia. The passage reads, “A new century would soon be drawing. We must forget the horrors. The Mayor proclaims a new day” (161). The words “the Mayor” simultaneously refer to the mayor that oversaw the fever and the mayor that ordered the bombing of West Philadelphia. This swift shift in perspective conveys the historical differences and unsettling parallels that Wideman sees between the two events.

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows more about a situation or conflict and its cause or resolution than the characters. Wideman uses this device to critique the ignorance of the city’s racist officials and doctors. 

The most instructive example of this is during the medical inquiry of Dr. Rush. Wideman positions readers to know better than the doctor from the early pages of the story, as he assumes that they know more modern knowledge about the fever and the sort of mosquito that transmits it. Moreover, several characters express doubt and criticism about Dr. Rush’s ideas and practices, including the most sympathetic narrator, Richard Allen. By positioning readers as knowing better than the doctor, Wideman prompts readers to regard his actions as foolhardy and self-interested. While Dr. Rush has been memorialized as a savior of the city, Wideman’s account of events suggests that more death and suffering was experienced than was necessary, both because of the doctor’s baseless theory that Africans were immune to the disease and because of the doctor’s ineffective treatment of bloodletting. 

Allen’s narration even includes evidence of Rush being met with resistance at the time: “Attacked on all sides by his medical brethren for purging and bleeding patients already in a drastically weakened state, Rush lashed back at his detractors” (148). This critique of Rush goes against the grain of the official account of the fever that has been handed down since the 18th century, effectively upending a long-standing belief about the past through the device of dramatic irony.