Who's Telling the Story?

May 19, 9:46 PMNY Writing Careers ExaminerTad Richards

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Illustration by Tad Richards

This probably doesn't bother most people, or it wouldn't be such a popular device in fiction, but it bothers me. I refer to the shifting first person point of view.

This is the novel that starts off being told in the first person by Cora, the graduate student who's having an affair with her social anthropology professor, and it goes on that way for forty pages or so, and then a chapter ends, and atop the next chapter is the word "Aaron," and the narrative continues in the first person, but suddenly it's not the neurotic and beleaguered Cora who's telling the story any more, but the sociopathic, sexually predatory gardener, who either picks up the story where Cora left it off, or goes back and covers more or less the same ground from a different perspective, or who starts off in a completely different place and time frame, but don't worry, it'll all tie together.

Then in another fifty pages, a chapter or a section will be entitled "Bernard," and suddenly it's Cora's mother's divorce lawyer taking over the story. Then maybe Cora comes back and takes another turn, or maybe it's the dog this time.

And I keep wondering, why did all these people decide to tell the same story? Well, the dog is faithful, so that's his excuse.

Stories are built on character, and character is built on motivation, and in the case of a first person narrator, that includes the narrator's motive for telling the story at all. Dr. Watson tells his stories because of his admiration for his friend Sherlock Holmes. Holden Caulfield tells his story because people think he's crazy, and he wants them to understand it's not him, it's this world full of phonies--and because he hopes if he tells the story, and reminds himself of what the world is like, he can keep it at bay for a little longer, and keep from turning into a phony himself.

People love the story about Kerouac batting out On the Road on benzedrine and a taped-together roll of paper, and it's a good story, and it's even true, but Kerouac worked on that book for a long time before he wrote that draft, and one of the principal things that ultimately pulled it together, and made the benzedrine-fueled writing jag possible, was Kerouac's discovery of Sal Paradise's motivation for telling the story--he's responding to a question from a new girl friend. The question isn't actually in the novel, but it's there nonetheless. She's met Dean and Carlo Marx and Sal's other friends, but she wants to know: "What was it like when you and your friends were out on the road?"

Right now I'm reading Eliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and I mostly like it, but I can't help but be bothered by the point of view shifts, especially because it starts out with such a promising gambit: Alex, the psychiatrist, trying to explain his patient/friend, Simon, to the old lover Simon is obsessed with, and whose son he has sort of kidnapped. Alex has control of the narrative, and a reason for telling the story. So how does he talk the woman's husband into picking up the thread? Or the prostitute who services the husband and befriends Simon? How did they all get together on this project?

E. L. Doctorow handles it in an interesting way in World's Fair. The narrator's mother, his aunt, and his older brother all take over the narration in different chapters, but they all have a reason for taking their turn. They're talking to the young man -- perhaps because his father has just died; that's suggested, but never stated -- and filling him in on parts of the story he doesn't know. They have motivation. And it adds immeasurably to my reading satisfaction.