Workshop 8 Lecture
Key Terms: narrator (first-person, second-person, third-person, unreliable, omniscient,
objective, limited-omniscient), setting, style
As we come to the end of the term, it becomes clear just how hard it is to cover even the
basics of fictional terminology. We've taken a good look at many important ideas
surrounding character, plot, and theme, but we haven't looked much at how stories are
told and the key terms and techniques related to the telling of stories. That's where this
lecture comes in. This is a quick look at how stories are told. There won't be any
assignments to help clarify these terms for you, but I will make liberal use of many of the
stories we've read in the past. I will also include these terms in the final exam, providing
you with a little motivation to pay attention, even at this late date.
Narrators
The first element of a story you notice--even before the characters and plot emerge--is the
narrator of the story. This is the voice that gives you the words of the story. We
distinguish the narrator from the author because they are never the same exactly. The
narrator represents the perspective that the author thinks is best for telling a story, and
even if that perspective is very close to the author's, it's still a choice the author is
making, and it's still a layer of filtering between the author and reader.
The types of narrators available to an author are all defined by their perspective on the
characters and actions of the story. They are broadly divided into three main groups: first
person, second person, and third person narrators. These groups are named for the
pronouns they use in telling the story. First person pronouns are "I" and "we." The
second-person pronoun is "you." Third-person pronouns are "he," "she," "it," and "they."
A first-person narrator is thus someone who can say "I" and "we." in telling the story.
This almost always makes that narrator a character within the world of the story. In
"Bartleby, the Scrivener," for example, the lawyer character is the one telling the story.
He can say things like "I had two persons as copyists" (21) and "I saw awhile in perfect
silence"(25) because he's a part of the story. First-person narrators exist on a spectrum,
ranging from narrators like the lawyer in "Bartleby" or Sonny's brother in "Sonny's
Blues" or the narrator of "Cathedral" who are the main characters (or at least very
important ones) to characters who sit on the edge of stories and observe the main
characters in action. The narrator of "A Rose for Emily" is probably the most remote
first-person narrator around. The narrator seems to speak for the town as a whole, saying
things like "this was the last we saw of Homer Barron" (129) or "for a long while we just
stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin" (13), without ever acting or
speaking as an individual character within that story.
The great advantage of using a first-person narrator is that it puts readers right into the
middle of the story by giving them access to the thoughts of a character. It puts readers
into that character's brain. The problem with using these narrators is that readers are
limited to the information that narrator would be likely to know (and think about), which
is sometimes a little sketchy. One way that writers will play with this is to create an
unreliable narrator. This is a first-person narrator who, as a character, has a questionable
perspective to offer. The narrator might be too young, for example, to offer
interpretations of action that we trust, or might be too clueless to see the full picture of
the story, or too biased, or just plain nuts. In these stories, the fun is in using the facts the
narrator provides to arrive at our own, different conclusions. Any first-person narrator has
some built-in unreliability, but it's the less credible ones we actually call unreliable. In the
stories we've read, few really rise to that level.
The second-person narrator is so rare as to barely worth noting. It's a bit of a magic trick
because it puts the reader into the world of the story by addressing the reader directly,
like Jamaica Kincaid does in her story "Girl" (255):
Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color
clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot
sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you
take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't
have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish
overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat
your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk
like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday
school; you mustn't speak to wharf–rat boys, not even to give directions.... [italics mine]
It's a neat trick when it works--putting the reader into your story like that--but it tends to
get old fast. That this story is only a page long (one gigantic sentence, actually) is no
accident. Readers often resist it, too, if they don't want to be the character they are said to
be (even though they know that's not really what's going on).
The perspective of the third-person narrator remains outside the world of the story. That
doesn't mean it doesn't zoom into the mind or minds of characters into the story or that it
doesn't pay close attention to the world of the story. It just means that it doesn't belong to
a character in the story. Instead of talking about me or us, it talks about him, her, or them.
You can think of the third-person narrator as a sort of movie camera, taking in all the
details without actually participating in them. However, there's one important distinction
between the third-person narrator and a movie camera. The third person narrator almost
always has access to the thoughts of one or more characters.
The omniscient narrator is a third-person narrator who has perspective on all or any
characters in a story and can, if necessary, access their consciousness. This narrator was
popular in the Nineteenth Century and can be seen in various novels by Dickens and
Austen and others that follow several characters through their stories. It's versatile
narrator, but it also diffuses the conflict and interest of readers by not keeping to a single
thread of plot. We have one example of this in our book, Richard Ford's "Under the
Radar," which stays mostly with one main character but also shifts for short stays in the
perspective of other characters. On the other side of the third-person spectrum is the
objective narrator. This narrator really is a movie camera because it only gives readers
what it sees and hears. It never gets into the inner (subjective) experience of characters.
Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" is an example of this narrator.
The most common narrator is the third-person limited-omniscient narrator. This narrator
stands outside the world of the story but follows one main character around and only goes
inside the thoughts and feelings of that character. That's how the omniscience is limited.
The other characters are seen objectively, and only as the one, chosen character would be
able to see them. In "Young Goodman Brown," for example, the third-person narrator
sticks to Brown and only records his thoughts and what he observes around him. We
don't leave Brown to check back on Faith. We only get a hint of her story where it crosses
his path. In "Death by Landscape," the narrator sticks with Lois, and we only know the
other characters as Lois remembers or observes them. In the "The Open Boat," the
narrator mostly sticks to the correspondent--only going into his brain for thoughts but
occasionally giving details the correspondent would not have observed (since he was
asleep). You can see the advantage here of being able to keep the reader close to the
action (like a first-person narrator) but also being able to pull back and be more reliable
in observing what's going on around that character.
The type of narrator is a choice the author makes, and it's made in part because of where
the author thinks the conflict is. Authors typically want the narrator close to the action, so
you can see where the narrator is focused (as a character of the character chosen for the
limited-omniscient narrator) and often that's the main character, the one whose wrapped
up in the main conflict. Noting that conflict helps to unravel plot and character both.
Consider, for example, the narrator of "A Rose for Emily." Faulkner puts the narrator's
perspective in the middle of the town's consciousness, and we soon see that this town
simply doesn't understand Emily Gierson, that the conflict is in large part, the conflict of
a town trying to get that one particular individual to behave in a way they can understand.
They keep coming after her. She keeps pushing them away. By putting readers into the
"we" of the narrator, readers are put in conflict with Emily, too, and share in that quest to
understand her and/or have her in her place. At the end, readers are there with the other
townspeople looking at the wedding chamber and Emily's gruesome triumph--over
Homer Barron and over the town (she won't ever fit in now). The choice of narrator keeps
us focused on that struggle to the end.
Setting
The setting of a story is the time and place (geographical, social, cultural, etc.) in which a
story happens. It can help to set a mood (as the dark, creepy forest does in "Young
Goodman Brown"). It can illustrate some theme of the story (as the depressingly huge
and uncaring ocean does in "The Open Boat"). It can also act as a sort of force or
character in the story. You see that most clearly in "Death by Landscape," where the
landscape either allows or perhaps causes Lucy's wished-for disappearance, but it's there
in "Bartleby," "Young Goodman Brown," and other stories, too. In "Sonny's Blues,"
Sonny, standing by the window at his brother's apartment, says, "All that hatred down
there,...all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart"
(166). The setting is perhaps the chief antagonist in that story for Sonny. He's constantly
struggling to find some peace in his setting there.
Setting is also the context with which we're able to judge the actions of characters. In
"Sonny's Blues," Sonny's drug use is more understandable and less "bad" because of all
the suffering and oppression he faces within that context. If he were living in a different
time and different place, the drug use might be less understandable. And because of this
same setting, the brother's initial intolerance of Sonny becomes less acceptable, too,
because we see that he's not factoring setting in to his judgment of his brother in spite of
all he too has seen about suffering. In "A Rose for Emily," something as mundane as
sending a tax notice can be judge as crass and ill-mannered because of the setting of the
white, southern society, where manners and good taste had initially created this false
loophole for Emily out of a sense of responsibility for her. Sending a tax notice is thus
more than just sending a tax notice. It's the rejection or complete ignorance of that
former, grander sensibility. I've heard writers say that story always arises from setting.
I'm not sure it that's true or not, but it certainly seems to be true for a lot of stories, and
it's always worth paying attention to.
Style
Style refers to the type of language employed by the writer, and it usually consists of the
diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure) of the story. Stories are made of
words and sentences, after all, so style is simply the manipulation of those words and
sentences to create certain effects. Hemingway is known as the greatest stylistic in
American literature, and in "Hills Like White Elephants" we see an example of his barebones style. He chooses simple, short words and puts them into generally short sentences.
He relies on nouns and verbs, with few adjectives. Often the sentences consist of strings
of words or phrases joined together with "and." It gives the feeling of journalism almost,
that here is the simple truth of this moment, without the imposition of the author's
opinions. It's easy to read, too, accessible.
Compare that style to the equally renowned style of Faulker:
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas
and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on
what had once been our most select street. (125)
Faulker's sentences are often long and flowing, piling on noun upon noun, and using
plenty of adjectives add layers of meaning even to the nouns. It's almost long-winded, the
style of a storyteller down at the courthouse square, and an educated one at that. It asks
for trust in its judgments. It draws many conclusions with those adjectives, and it expects
you will find no reason to dispute them. A very different relationship is thus created
between the narrator and reader than we saw with Hemingway. You can usually think of
the effect of these choices as the creation of a "voice" for the story. We define voices by
their tone, their level of education or sophistication, by what they expect the reader will
or will not understand, and so on. These are the effects of style, too, and they affect how
we approach the characters and actions presented.