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Narrators
I've been thinking about this subject for a little while and then last week I started reading Ian McEwan's Enduring Love which crystallised some of the thoughts I've been having.
It seems to me that a lot of advice to writers at the moment focusses on the 'point of view character' rather than the 'narrator'. The point of view character is usually (always?) part of the action and indeed the advice is often to choose the character who is most affected by the action, to give the greatest dramatic impact to the writing. Stories written in this way are often very good at drawing the reader in, so that we feel as if we are living the events of the story ourselves. This can be extremely effective indeed. The 'book' disappears and the 'world' is created instead.
What has irritated me is the implication that this is somehow the only way to write a story, or the 'best' way to write a story. Yet, when I look back at the books I most love, I find that very few of them indeed were written this way. I like books that give me different perspectives. In fact, I really like books written by that most-maligned of characters, the omniscient narrator. I like stories that offer a reflection on the events they relate. I like knowing more than the characters sometimes. I like being reminded that I am a reader. I like to be told a story, without being expected to live through it.
In Enduring Love, there is a first person narrator who is at the centre of events. But there is a very clear sense that he is relating this story with the perspective of hindsight, offering us his later reflection on the events. So he says things like:
What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness...
Knowing what I know now...
What I describe is shaped by what Clarissa saw too, by what we told each other in the time of obsessive re-examination that followed...
He's telling us his story, not as he experienced it in the moment, but as he thinks of it now, at some later date, after he's talked it through with others and thought about it. He can draw us in with his hints of things to come. He can give us different perspectives - not only what he saw, but what Clarissa later told him she saw. He can be conscious about the process of editing and shaping a story out of the events of his life. He's not completely omniscient, but omniscient enough (I haven't got very far through it yet; this may change and he may prove to be an unreliable narrator).
In Francine Prose's 'Reading Like A Writer' she talks about the problem of knowing the implied reader. I think this is a thing McEwan does well. There is a very strong sense in his books of these stories being told in specific situations to a specific audience. We know (by the end, at least) who Briony in Atonement is writing her story for and that shapes the story throughout.
So here's a little challenge. Who are your favourite literary narrators (named or unnamed)?
It seems to me that a lot of advice to writers at the moment focusses on the 'point of view character' rather than the 'narrator'. The point of view character is usually (always?) part of the action and indeed the advice is often to choose the character who is most affected by the action, to give the greatest dramatic impact to the writing. Stories written in this way are often very good at drawing the reader in, so that we feel as if we are living the events of the story ourselves. This can be extremely effective indeed. The 'book' disappears and the 'world' is created instead.
What has irritated me is the implication that this is somehow the only way to write a story, or the 'best' way to write a story. Yet, when I look back at the books I most love, I find that very few of them indeed were written this way. I like books that give me different perspectives. In fact, I really like books written by that most-maligned of characters, the omniscient narrator. I like stories that offer a reflection on the events they relate. I like knowing more than the characters sometimes. I like being reminded that I am a reader. I like to be told a story, without being expected to live through it.
In Enduring Love, there is a first person narrator who is at the centre of events. But there is a very clear sense that he is relating this story with the perspective of hindsight, offering us his later reflection on the events. So he says things like:
What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness...
Knowing what I know now...
What I describe is shaped by what Clarissa saw too, by what we told each other in the time of obsessive re-examination that followed...
He's telling us his story, not as he experienced it in the moment, but as he thinks of it now, at some later date, after he's talked it through with others and thought about it. He can draw us in with his hints of things to come. He can give us different perspectives - not only what he saw, but what Clarissa later told him she saw. He can be conscious about the process of editing and shaping a story out of the events of his life. He's not completely omniscient, but omniscient enough (I haven't got very far through it yet; this may change and he may prove to be an unreliable narrator).
In Francine Prose's 'Reading Like A Writer' she talks about the problem of knowing the implied reader. I think this is a thing McEwan does well. There is a very strong sense in his books of these stories being told in specific situations to a specific audience. We know (by the end, at least) who Briony in Atonement is writing her story for and that shapes the story throughout.
So here's a little challenge. Who are your favourite literary narrators (named or unnamed)?
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I think that new writers are advised to stick to single POV characters to learn the ways in which POV matters. Too many newbies don't understand that POV is like a camera angle or a backdrop, and to switch it back and forth is to make the reader dizzy. Once you master that principle, though, you can have a lot of fun playing with POV. Writing the same scene from two different PsOV is instructive, for example.
The main question is, what's the narrator's attitude towards the action? Amused, regretful, angry, dismissive, ironic? And is this in order to inspire the same attitude in the reader, or to give the reader something to argue with? In a piece that is mainly about one character's feelings, it may help to tell the story from that character's POV.
The omniscient narrator certainly provides distance and perspective from the action -- which is a good thing sometimes, and a bad thing sometimes.
Right now I'm still reeling from the narrative voice in Atonement, which seems to be an omniscient narrator but is, in fact, Briony looking back on past events at the end of her life. That was a master stroke.
The narrators that stick in my mind most are Melville's untrustworthy narrators -- especially in Bartelby and Billy Budd.
I also love the way John Irving uses narrative voices. I particularly remember The Water Method Man, in which the narative alternates between the MC's 1st-person voice (describing his present) and a third-person narrator (describing his past). In Garp he uses a third person omniscient, but that story is about the sorrows of the whole world -- whereas Hotel New Hampshire is about it's like to grow up in one particular family, so the first person narrator works best.
I liked how John Varley, in Millennium, alternated between the "testimony" of the two MC's, who experienced the same events in a completely different sequence.
It's also nice to contrast Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven with The Persian Boy. In FFH she uses 3rd person omniscient, but particularly for the purpose of giving multple points-of-view. She wants us to see Alexander from many different angles. (It also makes for some beautiful moments, as the single sentence in which we experience the slave-groom's grief at not being bought by the king.) But TPB is is a love story, and the 1st person makes it more intimate.
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"What's a good narrator for this story?"
“The main question is, what's the narrator's attitude towards the action? Amused, regretful, angry, dismissive, ironic? And is this in order to inspire the same attitude in the reader, or to give the reader something to argue with?”
Before that I was so lost and confused about the perceptions of my MC by my insightful readers, who only recently uncovered the meaning of “omniscience” to me in terms of hindsight. So I started wondering what exactly would work better for “this” story.
So by stressing the “attitude”, you practically spelled out what I was looking for but couldn’t form it in my mind.
Thank you again, and thank you, girlyswot, for a very useful article.