Writing Right with Dmitri: How Reliable Is Your Narrator?
Created | Updated Nov 27, 2011
Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.
Writing Right with Dmitri: How Reliable Is Your Narrator?
When you write, who's doing the talking? And can you believe them?
I'm not talking about the 'unreliable narrator', here. Or at least, not about the artful kind we've all read about – the one who starts spinning out a detective story for you to solve without admitting that he was the killer, or who yammers on at you about life in suburbia for a couple of hundred pages before letting you in on the fact that she's now dead and watching all this from the Astral Plane. Nor even those Edgar Allen Poe characters who lie and lie and lie...
No, I want to talk about what your narrators are doing to the story. They, er, use body English a lot. How reliable your narrator seems to be affects the way your reader takes to the story. This is true whether your narrator is out in front (first-person) or hiding behind the arras (third-person). One really easy way to see how this works is to look at older literature – which, besides being free and in public domain (heh, heh), gives us the advantage of historical perspective. After all, if the narrator tells us the heroine looks super-sexy in her new high-button shoes, we take it with a grain of salt and don't get all excited unless we're foot fetishists.
Narrators, even third-person narrators, take things for granted. They think the reader is going to agree with their value judgements. Often, these value judgements show the writer up for the narrow-minded so-and-so he is. For instance, the egregious and wordy Mr Nathaniel Hawthorne probably thought he was a progressive sort of thinker. After all, wasn't he writing The Scarlet Letter to criticize his awful Puritan ancestors? Surely, Hawthorne must have considered himself the early 19th-century equivalent of a bona fide Liberal. But look at this:
It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Sorry, Hawthorne never met a complex-compound sentence he didn't like. Notice, moreover (as Hawthorne would say), that the author takes it for granted that we, the readers, expect women to be demure. He also takes it for granted that we will buy into the amalgam of early Social Darwinism and Lamarckism that passes for thinking in upper-class New England. Not to mention the implication that the mother country is full of fat, mouthy women... Hawthorne expects us to share his notion that women in the early 19th Century had evolved – they had become slimmer, more girly, and above all, quieter than in the Old Days1. Doesn't this third-person narrator make you itch to lock him in a room with Gloria Steinem or Bella Abzug? Don't you gag at such phrases as 'the man-like Elizabeth'? Don't you want to tie this guy up and send him over Niagara Falls in a barrel? 'Nuff said.
Third-person narration often assumes that we readers share the writer's sensibilities. Louisa May Alcott was another forward-thinking New Englander (for her time) who had all sorts of jolly improving ideas about how to run a home for boys:
Nursey approved the plan, finished Nat off with a flannel night-gown, a drink of something warm and sweet, and then tucked him into one of the three little beds standing in the room, where he lay looking like a contented mummy and feeling that nothing more in the way of luxury could be offered him. Cleanliness in itself was a new and delightful sensation; flannel gowns were unknown comforts in his world...It was like a cosy dream; and he often shut his eyes to see if it would not vanish when he opened them again. It was too pleasant to let him sleep, and he could not have done so if he had tried, for in a few minutes one of the peculiar institutions of Plumfield was revealed to his astonished but appreciative eyes.
A momentary lull in the aquatic exercises was followed by the sudden appearance of pillows flying in all directions, hurled by white goblins, who came rioting out of their beds. The battle raged in several rooms, all down the upper hall, and even surged at intervals into the nursery, when some hard-pressed warrior took refuge there. No one seemed to mind this explosion in the least; no one forbade it, or even looked surprised. Nursey went on hanging up towels, and Mrs. Bhaer laid out clean clothes, as calmly as if the most perfect order reigned. Nay, she even chased one daring boy out of the room, and fired after him the pillow he had slyly thrown at her. – Louisa May Alcott, Little Men
Oh, look, a pillow fight! Cool. But notice how the narrator puts thoughts into the little boy's head? Don't you feel patronised by that 'astonished but appreciative eyes' business? I know I do. Moral: Stop telling people what they are supposed to feel.
First-person narrators are more up-front. You can do a lot with them, too, like get a bit of intertextual irony going:
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly – Tom's Aunt Polly, she is – and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before. – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Notice the sly plug in there? I wonder if the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn sold any more copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer? It's kind of like a pre-internet hyperlink. Of course, we all know that Huck Finn is one of the most banned books on the planet – but probably not because of crass commercialism.
The very best thing your narrator can do, besides make everybody laugh, always a good thing, is to get the reader on his side. O Henry was the undisputed master of this, as he shows here:
I don't suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it...
But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.
I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros grain flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a pet – a mamma's own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: 'Oh, oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?' – O Henry, Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
Now, this narrator is totally unreliable. For one thing, he's a dog. Dogs can't talk. There's no way he could operate a typewriter. And even if he could, how could he possibly have read Kipling? Or know enough politics to make that 'Tammanoo the tiger' joke? (It's a Thomas Nast reference.) Or...? Oh, forget it. Just sit back and enjoy. The story is pure delight.
No matter how you narrate the story, some readers will go along. Others will resist anything you do, but they shouldn't be reading fiction. Forget them. Just remember to be consistent and fair with the reader, and they'll go along for the ride.
Oh, by the way...I admit it. I'm really a sentient AI program, and I'm writing this from a communication satellite in geostationary orbit...all your base are belong to us...
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