by Sherwood Smith
The holiday extravaganzoo is well over, and here we are with a year stretching ahead of us. Writers who felt glum at the end-of-year examination for what they didn’t get done are determined to get a fresh start in a fresh year.
So. Writing.
A bunch of writers were talking about various ways to come at a piece. Besides plot, there’s narration, specifically fashions in narration and how they have changed.
This led to a question. Is there a “reliable narrator?” I think all narrators are unreliable—the subject is fiction, which can be described as lies we pretend are true. No matter how hard we try to portray the truth as we know it, in whatever form, well, it’s still just as we know it.
Anyway, this discussion caused me to jot down some notes about different sorts of narrators and narrative voices. See what you think.
First, I believe that the concept of their being any kind of narrator, reliable or un, trips up some writers as well as readers, especially those who have grown up assuming that limited third is the only permissible POV. From what I’ve been seeing, the assumption, whether conscious or unconscious, that limited third = “truth” –that there is a direct line between text and reader—has some unfortunate results. For purposes of this ramble, I’ll name two: the writer is left fashioning awkward constructions in order to reveal the thoughts of a character outside of the present POV, and second, the writer resorts to the bland, supposedly neutral “journalistic” voice in presenting background material. Thus the reader grimaces and either plows through, skims, or skips that Deadly Data Dump.
I suspect that sometimes the Deadly Data Dump is the result of the assumption that there is no narrator. The characters not only do not react to the data, the story stops for the page, or even the single line, where the data is inserted, but the writer doesn’t see that—because, they argue, it’s part of the “truth” of the story. No, I say, it’s the writer stepping directly out from behind the curtain, shoving the narrative voice aside in order to lecture the reader directly, and tell them what to believe.
When one reads a lot of old novels, as I do, one is exposed to the accepted POV of that time—either first person omni or third person omni. A side observation, made over the years of using classics in the classroom, is that many readers will assume that first person omni might be unreliable but third person omni isn’t! It’s a good exercise to look at various stories and books, and discover that most of the time, the first-person narrator we want to accept as reliable is the one we sympathize with—like Huck Finn—and the one we disbelieve is the one that turns us off, like the barber in “The Haircut.”
I don’t think there can be a straight line between text and reader, that there is always a narrator in-between, like a bead on a string. Omniscient POV relies on the reader being aware of the narrator, and of the fact that the narrator is narrating a story.
The narrative voices of the great writers sometimes slide the bead closer to the reader. That is, they give us the camera eye view of the characters while never revealing their thoughts. Some slide it in the other direction, toward the characters, that is, revealing character thought and motivation in the characters’ own voice, while the narrative voice retreats into the b.g. The extreme of this narrative voice would be stream-of-consciousness, which is a very intimate form of third person–more intimate than first person–without the character being aware of telling a story.
I wonder if the radical shift in literary fashion to what is often called “dramatic third” (or cinematic third) early in the last century gave rise to the idea that the camera-eye-view is “truth.” I know I’ve read many early essays about the merciless truth of the camera eye, and of course in those early days people roaming around shooting real life as it happened did convey a breathtaking sense of vérité.
Conrad, Hemingway, Chandler, Fitzgerald, etc, largely stayed outside their characters’ heads, relying on the “cinematic” technique of revealing character through description of actions, expressions, even objects. Culminating in Dashiel Hammet’s ultra-cinematic writing, wherein his descriptions are the textual equivalents of camera shots.
But the thing is, these writers, I believe, were very aware of their narrators, because sometimes the narrator does intrude, very briefly, sometimes for just a sentence—even an adverb—to reveal thoughts, reactions, emotions, that the camera could never capture. These brief, telling inclusions are very effective: they intensify the story at just the right moment, often without the reader being aware of the narrator’s sleight-of-hand.
Sherwood Smith is a member of Book View Cafe
recalling my delight, as a kid while reading OT psalms, when suddenly god would be speaking in place of the singer/poet. it was quite mysterious to me. i don’t recall if i thought of this in formal terms…but i might have.
Cinda-cite: Oh yes. Thinking back, I was subliminally aware of different narrators in the Bible.
I think a lot about who is telling the story and why.
Reliable narrators tell the truth as they know it. I read a lot of mysteries and first person narrators are usually “reliable” but they may be ignorant or wrong.
Agatha Christie did something intriguing with a first person “reliable” narrator in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. He tells the truth–just not all of it–something like Bilbo in the Hobbit trailer. But I don’t want to spoil if any mystery lovers out there have not read it.
Josephine Tey did, too, as I recall, in Brat Farrar, if I’m not mistaken.
And Megan Whalen Turner in The Thief!
I always try to figure out who the first person pov thinks s/he’s addressing. Who are this ‘you’? Persumably ‘me,’ and why is this other you, the first person narrator wanting to tell the ‘me-you’ all this in the first place?
Love, c.
I think that the moment when it all came together for me was when I first read French Lieutenant’s Woman (I was about 13). The way in which Fowles broke the fourth wall suddenly made me see narrators in a different light… and from then on, I never took narration for granted again.
My favorite “biased” narrative voice is the first-person character who lies to himself and isn’t even aware of it. He may not know that he’s lying, and straightly tries to point out all the possible ways that he distorted the truth, but there’s something not right about his perceptions or beliefs—an inconsistency, or something… It’s “reliable,” because the story is told “as far as the character knows,” but the character’s conclusions are wrong and this has to be caught by the reader. I felt this very strongly in the book “Remains of the Day.”
I enjoy it when we know who the narrator is–like when we get Eustace’s journal entries in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I also enjoy it when the narrator talks to us directly, even when we don’t know who he or she is. C.S. Lewis does this sometimes in other parts of the Narnia series, as I recall.
My favorite unreliable narrator is from The Confessions of a Mask. Even the title hints at his unreliability. How can a Mask confess? Shouldn’t it be confessions from behind a mask? Or Confessions unmasked? But maybe that’s a way to think of narration, or fiction as a whole. It is a mask for the author, and it is telling you the truth, as much as a mask can ever tell the truth.
These are all terrific examples.
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I think all narrators are unreliable—the subject is fiction, which can be described as lies we pretend are true.
This. That’s the truth for me. There are books where we learn and accept the narrator is unreliable because he’s human – GRRM is a good example of that. But people don’t realize all narrators are unreliable. Ed Greenwood clinched that point for me – we ask him manhy questions about his books in Candlekeep Forums, and from the start, he’s always made this point: Consider the source. He says the source is Elminster, one of the powerful mages of that world, who’s manipulating it to a certain point. As such, any information that is disclosed to us in novels is information Elminster wants to disclose to us – what he allowed to be written as history. But in truth, here are many secrets he is keeping, because revealing them would be detrimental to his plans. It also neatly explains away NDA’s.
I suspect that sometimes the Deadly Data Dump is the result of the assumption that there is no narrator.
Now, that’s an interesting notion! I’m addicted to living narrative voices, and so am prejudiced in its favour.
The opposite of the cinematic school ought to come into its own in fantastic fiction – where one can create a narrator obviously embedded in the Secondary World, who tells the actual reader all sorts of things by their interactions with their implied and fictional audience.
Steven Brust’s outrageous Paarfi takes this – brilliantly, to my mind – about as far as it can go: a magnificently wrongheaded narrator not so much emerging from the shadows, as tap-dancing in the limelight. But there are gentler and more generally applicable shades of the narrator’s view/narrative truth contrast to be had.
The great art is then faking the otherworldly narration in the same spirit as any good author fakes ‘realistic’ dialogue. A narrator supposedly embodied in Third Age Middle-Earth or Diane Duane’s Four Kingdoms would be pretty opaque to an our-worldly audience, if allowed to write really naturally – the unspoken assumptions would be coming monstrous thick and fast. So what we get then seems to me a hybrid narration, belonging to the telling rather than to either the world it’s told in or the world it’s told of.
Whether it succeeds or fails is all about pulling it off so that the reader is too captivated by the tale to notice that crafty blurring of the teller’s status – as a playgoer ought to be too captivated by the drama to notice what the Roman Forum they are watching it unfold in is actually made of…
Gary: exactly. Paarfi comes out on stage. Terry Pratchett’s narrator doesn’t come forward, but entertains us anyway. (Pratchett makes footnotes fun. How cool is that?)
Koby: this is where writing can really get fun–deciding who the narrator is, and why this narrator is narrating. There is so much that can be done with the voices telling the story!
Foxessa: By contrast, when I’m *writing* first person, one of the thing I need to know to make the voice authentic — or, at least, I hope it does — is who the character thinks they’re writing to. Which rarely looks like a 21st century novel reader. We’re just the lucky or unlucky ones Who happened upon the text later — like a diary found in a dig.
This was great. Thanks