What They See is What You Get (Part 2)
This is part two of my series on point of view. If you’d like to read the first post right here. So without further adieu, let’s get into to it.
First Person
First person is probably the most natural of all points of view and often establishes the most immediate sense of empathy. We instantly connect with the I on the page because we recognize this as a symbol for selfdom. It is an idea that we identify with because we are all the I of our own consciousness. Just look at the following passage from The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow:
“I am an American, Chicago-born–Chicago, that somber city–and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”
Bellow choose first person in order to make friends with his reader. It’s a tactic that, if not prescribed to an interesting character, can often backfire. But luckily for Bellow, Augie March is one of the greatest characters in all of American Literature.
Of course, this should not be our sole consideration for choosing first person. Obviously, when you choose to transcribe a character’s dictation, you are limited in a number of ways:
- Your narrator can only know the things he or she knows through either experience or report.
- Your narrator always has to be a part of the action.
- Your narrator has a bias.
These three tenets are our essential guides when writing in first person. The first one is important because human beings cannot be outside themselves: They cannot know the thoughts and feelings of others truly. We can only give clues and details that suggest but not define the others around them. (Narrators who are mindreaders are often lazy and dishonest, because they can, at will, eliminate all subtext and uncertainty–and tension.) The second one is important because, if they are not involved, they can go fuck about elsewhere draining the story of its momentum; however, that does not mean the narrator has to be the protagonist. Just look at The Great Gatsby for an example of a first-person narrator who is peripheral to the action but still in observance of it. And lastly, your narrator must have a bias because we all have a bias. Some people use the term unreliable, but I’ve always avoided it because it sounds like the narrator should purposely mislead the reader. (Obviously, when you’re being willfully dishonest, you’re being a bad writer and an asshole.) But it’s more like your narrator has a blind-spot. We all have these. There are things about ourselves we don’t like to admit, things that we don’t even know are true. We are always, and at once, the person we think we are, the person others think we are, and the person we really are. Yet we can only show the one the narrator thinks he or she is. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Nick Carraway is one of the best examples of this.
He tells us his father told him to reserve his judgement about others, and it’s advice that Nick intends to follow. But as we read the book, we discover that Nick has a blind-spot: He judges everyone constantly. Keep in mind: He isn’t (and nor is Fitzgerald) lying or being purposely dishonest or hiding the truth. He’s a person with flaws, and it takes someone from the outside to expose them.
One last note about first person. Too often do we leave out that first-person does not solely mean I: It can also be we. One of the best examples of first-person plural can be found in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
“So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
“That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart–the one we believed would marry her–had deserted her.”
Here the same rules apply, but you as the writer now have access to the collective consciousness of multitudes. My only advice would be to give it a natural limit: a couple, a town, a city, a state, a country, a world, a universe. And even though it may seem all encompassing, there are still those outside of that group, those untouched minds who are intimately unknowable.
Second Person
The second person has always been tricky. With the pronoun you, the writer is imposing on the reader, regardless of whether the character is the reader (like in If on a winter’s night a traveler…) or a character (like Artemio Cruz in the writing of Carlos Fuentes). We relate to the character because the you is us and probably makes it easier to identify with. We both the you and not the you.
Just take a look at this example from Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City:
You met her in Kansas City, where you had gone to work as a reporter after college. You had lived on both coasts and abroad; the heartland was until then a large blank. You felt that some kind of truth and American virtue lurked thereabouts, and as a writer you wanted to tap into it.
Notice that the you here relates to experiences you are unlikely to have had, and yet, you empathize regardless. The second person is the great unknown of fiction: Too many writers fear it–probably because they don’t understand it. Nonetheless, it is a powerful tool when used properly. It manifests itself best when used as a remnant of the cultural zeitgeist. There may be things that are unique to Bright Lights, Big City, things that only our protagonist has experienced, but overall, the novel is about the excess and excrement of the 1980s. If you were alive during that time (or read about it), you can empathize. You understand those feelings, that alienation. Note too that McInerney is responding to the same fears as Bret Easton Ellis but using a much different vehicle. Ellis wants to subject us to the completeness of selfdom, that sense that we (himself included) are what is wrong in the world–all through the use of I–but McInerney remains a distant judge. He puts us in that excess and sees himself (or his narrator) removed from it. The use of second person serves as a societal mirror. It exposes our flaws, and we can only cringe.
Third Person
Third person is the most used of all our points of view and probably the least appreciated. Too often do people constrain it to one of three hard and fast modes: dramatic, limited, or omniscent. While these are helpful, I do not think we should limit ourselves in such a way. All fiction requires some combination of the three. One may be more stressed than the other, but it does not mean, as my composition II professor once said, that the writer “messed up.”
Maybe it is best that we start with definitions.
Dramatic: In this mode, the writer aims to show only what is happening. Think of it as a camera’s lense. We are never invited to explore the minds of any of the characters. We are to watch as if it is a movie.
Limited: Here, readers can access only the mind of the protagonist–(or a peripheral observer). To put it plainly, we can know but one character’s thoughts and feelings.
Omniscient: In this case, we explore the thoughts of all he characters–or at least, it is a possibility. We are granted entry to most characters minds.
While these distinctions are convenient, they are not necessarily true. David Jausse looks at it as a matter of long shots and x-rays. When writing third person, you have options when describing a scene. You can write it from the camera’s point of view and only show what is happening. This is especially true in a story like “Hills Like White Elephants.” But you may also go deeper. If a writer writes a scene in the limited form, it does not mean every line will be from the viewpoint character’s point of view, not every sentence will start “So-and-so watched other-character sit down.” It would just be “Other character sat down.” In other words, there will always be the “camera’s eye.”
Typically, and probably most logically, a scene should belong to one character. There should be someone with whom we empathize. We need a viewpoint we understand or can learn to understand. However, it does not mean that the next scene must be told from that point of view. It can be told from another. Just look at Tolstoy: He tells a scene from the point of view of a dog–a fucking dog! But there is no better example of the malleability of the third person point of view than Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” It is as close to perfect as it gets. Most of the story is told from an objective or dramatic point of view. Not once do we gain access to the characters’s thoughts and feelings, but towards the end, when Hemingway has exhausted his brillant dialogue, do we look into the mind of the American:
The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said.
“What did she say?” asked the girl.
“That the train is coming in five minutes.”
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
“I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man
said. She smiled at him.
“All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.”
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to
the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.
“Do you feel better?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”
This entire scene, with the exception of one moment, is told in dramatic point of view. Everything that happens is what is said and done, but as Jausse points out, there is one moment when this story becomes the man’s. “They were all waiting reasonably for the train.” It is the adverb that tips us off. Look at the rest of the text. How many adverbs do you see above? Two. The idea that they are waiting reasonably is the protagonist’s, the American’s–not the narrator’s. (The other is that “the girl smiled brightly,” which may be the woman’s impression.)
Third person narration is about access. It’s about choosing where to go at the right time. Hemingway looks into the mind of the American because he wants us to see his frustration, his desire to make his girlfriend understand. The people are waiting “reasonably” in contrast to his girlfriend who is not “reasonable” about getting an abortion. Admittedly, if we didn’t see inside the American’s mind, we would still know what a fool he was, what a dick he was, but with this additional information, we get a slightly better understanding of him as a character and his bias. We’re meant to emphasize with him. However, we as readers have a bigger perspective than his. Therefore, we know what a fool he is. We can see his idiocy. That’s what makes it such a brilliant story.
Third person is all about choice. It is a matter of when to reveal what and how. It’s not about being dishonest or deceitful though: It’s about giving the reader the information he or she needs as soon as possible.
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That concludes part two of this very long (time-wise) series of readings. I hope this all makes sense. I will see you next time.