Me, Myself, and Aghghghgh!

Point of View, Part 2

[Before we start this craft-wonk deep dive: I’ve got over 20,000 subscribers now, and I just want to say thank you for being here and for spreading the word. Celebratory Zillow post coming next week!]

Last month I started writing about point of view on the page, and how nailing it down will solve like 90% of your problems.* That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s endlessly complicated. The other good news is there are relatively easy fixes. The other bad news is that eggs now cost $56 each.

*Only your problems with writing fiction, sorry.

A few years ago, attempting to break down all the different facets of narrative point of view (mostly for my students, but also for myself), I constructed a kind of ridiculous eight-page checklist. Yes, eight pages. I soon realized that when I sent it to students I needed to include directions on how not to panic… For that reason, I’m not going to share the whole thing here yet, just the first part.

Today we’re going to break down first person (and when I say “break down” I mean like what an over-zealous chef does with a chicken). What follows is all (or at least most) of the considerations for first person—that is, all the questions you need to be able to answer, the things that should be consistent in your text.

I’m not going to put names to any of these, but I’ve given examples where I can… If you have more examples, please post in the comments!

For First Person (“I” or “we”) Narrators:

1. Who is telling the story?

   1. Plural (we)

      1. A true “hive mind” plural, with no characteristics of an individual narrator standing out from the rest (Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides)

      2. A stated or implied singular within the plural (e.g., we know our narrator is
         Jake, but everything is about what “we,” the Cub Scout pack, did)

      3. Individual members of the collective “we” are described and given 3^rd person scenes, but there is no central protagonist or narrator (Ferris, Then We Came to the End; Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic)

   2. Singular (I)

      1. We have one point of view for the entire story

      2. We rotate between multiple first-person points of view

   3. A funky combination

      1. First-person narrator occasionally inserting self into otherwise 3^rd person story

         1. As a named or implied character (Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

            1. This is obvious from the start

            2. The narrator is slowly revealed as someone we know from the story (Greer, Less)

         2. As a disembodied voice, an “I” with opinions but no identity within the story (Martin Amis, The Information)

         3. As the author (A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh)

      2. First-person narrative enveloped or framed within a 3^rd person narrative, or within another 1^st person narrative (Martel, Life of Pi; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Shelley, Frankenstein)

      3. Third-person narrative enveloped within a 1^st person narrative reader (i.e., “Here is the story as it was told to me…”; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights)

         1. That story is received from a reliable source

         2. That story is unreliable or imagined (Wharton, Ethan Frome; Erens, The Virgins)

2. Whose story is it, really?

   1. For one person’s point of view:

      1. Narrator is protagonist, the one who changes (Holden Caulfield)

      2. Narrator is the observer of the one most dramatically transformed (Nick Carraway)

   2. For rotating/multiple 1st person points of view:

      1. The epiphanies/revelations are for the reader, in the eventual coming
         together of these viewpoints; the characters might remain unchanged, or
         unaware of the connections between their stories, connections only the reader is in possession of (Krauss, The History of Love)

      2. The epiphanies/revelations are for one specific character

      3. The revelations are for multiple characters (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

         

         One thing not covered here is the Royal We. Strange way to write a book, but knock yourself out.

3. How is the story told?

   1. The narrative is explicitly written, and refers to itself this way (Nabokov, Lolita; Walker, The Color Purple; Egan, The Keep)

   2. The narrative is explicitly “told”

      1. It is told with some premise for the telling (Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint)

      2. There’s no premise for the telling, but there are references to an audience (Sebold, The Lovely Bones; Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

   3. The narrative just exists

4. To whom (theoretically or explicitly) is the story being told?

   (Big footnote here. I talk a lot about what I call “the ear of the story,” and this is where we’re getting into that territory. This is complicated enough—and important enough, and rarely enough discussed—that I will do a whole post on it soon. Meanwhile…)

   1. The narrative has a named or implied audience

      1. The implied audience is the narrator herself (often a diary format; Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary)

      2. The implied audience is the whole world/anyone who will listen

      3. The implied audience is a specific group (e.g., “ladies and gentlemen of the jury…” in Nabokov’s Lolita)

      4. The implied audience is a specific type of person (e.g., a story that starts “I bet that like me, you’ve been on bad blind dates with handsy guys.”) (Note that this is not the implied commercial audience of the book, but the implied audience within the narration)

      5. The implied audience is one specific fictional person (e.g., the psychiatrist in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint)

      6. The book is addressed to the one specific but anonymous person reading it at that moment (e.g., Jane Eyre – “Reader, I married him”)

   2. The narrative is simply being put into the world, with no implications of an audience or the lack thereof (*although this isn’t as simple as it seems)

   3. The narrator would be horrified if anyone “heard” their thoughts
      

5. Who knows what?

   1. About this world:

      1. We are being spoken to like we already know this world and all the people in it (e.g., a story starts “The second time I found her, she was at Sal’s, holding that damn bagpipe again.”)

      2. We are being spoken to like we don’t know anything about this world or people at all (e.g., “When I was nineteen, I lived in a small town in Idaho called Fish Falls, and there I met a girl who played the bagpipes.”)

      3. We are being spoken to like we know some things about this world, but not all of them (e.g., “My first full year in Fish Falls, right after that whole thing happened with my brother, I met a girl who played the bagpipes.”)

   2. About this story:

      1. The narrator knows more than the reader simply because this story already happened, and there’s a bit of foreshadowing/a sense that this story is already known to the narrator.

      2. The narrator knows more than the reader and seems to be withholding information, waiting to tell us things, even teasing or taunting the reader; (Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle)

      3. The narrator seems to know the same amount as the reader (especially common in a present tense story)

      4. The narrator knows less than the reader (e.g., he hasn’t figured out yet that his wife is cheating on him, but it’s pretty obvious to the reader) (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”)
         

6. In what tone is the story being told?
   (This has a lot to do with who, in theory, is being spoken to)

   1. There’s a sense of openness and intimacy

   2. There’s a sense of caginess

   3. There’s a sense of formality and distance

   4. There’s an attempt at humor

   5. There’s an assumption of camaraderie and understanding

   6. etc. etc. etc. (this one is really limitless, but always worth defining as you proceed)

7. When is the story being told?

   1. The story is told in the present tense or in the recent past, as if it has just happened

   2. The story is told at some distance

      1. How much of a distance?

         1. It’s being told from a stated time in the future (“Now that I’m a parent, I remember those days differently.”)

            1. We know the current situation of the narrator (“I’m staring out the window of my retirement home, remembering the year I turned fifteen.”)

            2. We only know how much time has passed.

         2. That distance only implied (“I walked to the payphone. Remember payphones? And I dialed my uncle, who was still alive.”)

      2. What has the narrator learned?

         1. The narrator knows the same amount as when the story occurred

         2. The narrator knows more now (about life, or what actually happened back then) than when the story occurred

            1. This is implied (through language, irony, etc. – John Updike’s “A&P,” T. C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake”)

            2. This is stated (“Looking back, I realize they must have been in love”)

            3. The narrator has learned things between the events and the telling

            4. The narrator learns things right in front of us, through telling the story

         3. The narrator know less now (this is a strange one, but Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon pulls it off)

8. How reliably is the story being told?

   1. The narrator is reliable, and we have no reason to doubt their honesty, intentions or perceptions

   2. The narrator is unreliable

      1. We suspect we are being lied to (Nabokov, Pale Fire)

      2. The narrator is aware of us as an audience, and is posing, posturing, or defending (Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Nabokov, Lolita)

      3. The narrator does not understand everything that is happening (Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime)

      4. The narrator does not remember things correctly

      5. The narrator is basically honest but is hiding certain things from us

         1. These things are never revealed

         2. These things are revealed later in the story

      6. The narrator is unreliable for brief periods (e.g., when she is drunk, or a chapter that reads as straightforward and we find out later was an episode of wishful thinking (Amis, Money: A Suicide Note)
         

9. Why is the story being told?

   1. There’s a sense that the story is being told… because the listener(s) really need to hear it

   2. … as a way for the narrator to process what happened

   3. … for posterity

   4. … out of guilt or regret

   5. … to prove a point or prove why the narrator did things that way

   6. … to teach someone or everyone a certain lesson about life

   7. … to ask a question that still bothers the narrator

   8. … to mislead people about what really happened

   9. There’s a sense that the narrator is, through the telling, realizing or remembering certain things for the first time

   10. There’s the sense that this is the first time the narrator has ever told this story

   11. There’s the sense that the narrator has told this story before

       1. for similar purposes

       2. for different purposes

HELP!

Yeah, okay. You’re probably not going to sit down with this list before you begin your story. It would be a hell of way to cramp your creativity. But at some point, perhaps in revision, you need to get things straight.

You could do that by painstakingly working your way through this list, or you could decide on the circumstances of telling. This doesn’t have to be a logical or realistic situation, but one that makes sense to you, and that you stick to consistently.

Some examples of that:

(But first, I want to note that most of these are only situations that exist in the author’s mind. You do not need to state this literally on the page.)

• Theoretically (although I’m never going to say this), the story is being told by Gillian when she’s an old woman, looking back on those years. She’s talking to anyone who will listen, and needs to get things off her chest before she dies. She has not thought about George in fifty years.

• Theoretically, Angie is telling this story five days after the incident, and she’s still trying to process what happened. Theoretically (not on the page!) she’s talking to her friend who goes to another school, so she’s speaking informally. This friend already knows her, but doesn’t know the other characters.

• I’m going to create a frame story in which Eleanor is sitting down on a first date in grad school, and telling her date this story to warn him about what kind of person she truly is.

• Theoretically (not literally on the page!) Louie is narrating this after his death, at a magic confessional booth in heaven that makes everyone tell the truth, even when they didn’t know those truths during life. I am never going to mention this scenario.

• Theoretically, Marco is looking down from a cloud years later with access to his own past self but also with much greater insight into his parents’ minds, now that he himself is an adult.

And once again, I’m going to shout at you that YOU DO NOT NEED TO MAKE UP A LITERAL FRAME NARRATIVE IN ORDER FOR YOUR STORY OR NOVEL TO MAKE SENSE. I’m shouting (sorry) because every time I talk about this stuff in class, my students all decide they need to insert a cumbersome frame narrative, and while that’s cool if you really want to you absolutely do not have to do that.

Most books you’ve read do not have a big, overt setup around how and when the story is being told. What they do have is consistency. So we don’t get a story in which at first the narrator doesn’t know what’s coming and then they do and there’s a lot of foreshadowing, and then there isn’t; and they’re talking to us like we don’t know this world, but then suddenly we’re just expected to know who “Lucky Linda” is, and we have a random “way back then” thrown in just one time for no apparent reason. Those are the inconsistencies that will give a reader a headache.

Third Person Will Be Easier, Right? Or at Basically Least the Same?

Bwaaaaaaahahahahahahahaha, you poor sweet child. No. Stay tuned.

How About Some Sample Passages?

You deserve at least that much.

Here is the opening of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were; let’s come at it completely cold:

We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead. Then again, how could we have known when they didn’t want us to know? When we began to wobble and stagger, tumbling and snapping like feeble little branches, they told us it would soon be over, that we would be well in no time. They asked us to come to village meetings, to talk about it. They told us we had to trust them.

Here’s what we can pull from this:
- At least so far, there seems to be a true collective “we,” with no individuals yet distinguished.
- There’s a later point of telling; that is, we’re looking back at this from some unspecified point in the future.
- The narrators now know more than they did at the time; and they’re letting their audience in on this knowledge.
- We are being spoken to as if we already know this world, who “they” are, what environmental disasters are in play.
- There’s a sense of anger and regret, and perhaps a hint that this is one of the reasons the story is being told.

Here’s Pamela Erens’ The Virgins, referenced above for a strange framing that won’t yet be evident here:

We sit on the benches and watch the buses unload. Cort, Voss, and me.
We’re high school seniors, at long last, and it’s the privilege of seniors to take up these spots in front of the dormitories, checking out the new bodies and faces. Boys with big glasses and bangs in their eyes, girls with Farrah Fawcett hair.

What we can tell so far:
- Although the first word is “we,” this is a first-person story.
- We’re being spoken to like we don’t actually know much about these people or this place. (We need to be told they’re seniors, told about senior privilege…)
- The present tense might suggest that this all just happened, and if we kept on in this mode, we’d keep that assumption. But then check out the beginning of chapter 2:

It’s late September, early October. Let’s say October, that first week, the peak of foliage season.

Woah, okay. This is definitely being remembered at some distance. And our narrator is at least a little bit unreliable. (Spoiler: This narrator is verrrrry unreliable.)

There are two more examples (good ones) below the paywall, for paid subscribers (because I love you). Meanwhile, for everyone: If you’re into this, pull five first-person books off your shelf and see how much you can glean from the first lines about the point of view choices that have been made.