Part Two: It's All About Voice

Early first person novels, as I describe in a previous section, gain their authority by the guise of personal writing: they are cast in the form of letters or diaries or, in some cases, eye-witness accounts and because of their form gain the authority of being actual letters or diaries or first person accounts. It is difficult, I imagine, for contemporary readers to understand effectiveness of these forms, but many original readers of Richardson's and Defoe's classics believed in the authenticity of the forms so much Defoe's exertion that Robinson Crusoe was, in fact, a real person (for whom Defoe was merely arranging his memoirs) led to a great interest in the story as history and that when a certain public reading of Richardson's Palema reached the point where Pamela overcame Mr. B's licentious threats the town's church bells were rung in memory and celebration of her virtue. These devices, however, have long since been dismissed as nothing more than devices, which leaves the contemporary author with the question of authority: how does an author convince readers in the reality of his characters' story; that is, how does an author give his fiction the authority of history?

I will restrict my answers to the situation of the first person narrator, which in some cases will also apply to situation of third person narrators but in other places will not. It seems there are a number of methods when, used in various combinations, will elevate fiction in such a way to give it the texture of reality. These responses have mainly to do with human nature because, after all, narrators are derivative of people and the way fictional narrators elect to tell their stories should, of course, be derivative of the way actual people tell their own stories. I have arranged my responses into three general categories which I think are most important for first person narrators.

First of all, a narrator must have a personal sense of authority. A narrator must know-or believe he knows-the story which he is telling and, by doing so, give the reader adequate reason to read. My favorite example of this comes from The Adventures of Huck Finn, where on the first page the fictional narrator, Huck Finn, exerts himself as such an authority his knowledge overshadows that of the actual author, Mark Twain. In effect, Huck claims that Mark Twain, in his previous book, The Adventures of Tom Saywer, came close to understanding Tom's world, but ultimately did not get everything right, and that you, the readers, should listen to him, Huck, not to Mark Twain, because Huck possesses a more accurate, therefore authoritative, understanding the events and the characters:

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.

F. Scott Fitzergald's narrator, Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby, establishes his authority by 1) possessing unique and interesting knowledge, that about Gatsby, and 2) implying that the events in this book are so significant that they caused him to change-change being a fundamental human condition-so F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator, through this initial chapter, gives his novel both authority and immediacy, a reason why readers should read:

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of "creative temperament"-it was such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

Similarly J.D. Salanger's narrator, in The Catcher in the Rye, not only promises to reveal unique knowledge, in much the same way as Huck Finn and Nick Carraway, but its narrator, Holden Caulfield, renders his story in the vernacular-that is, his writing is meant to sound as if he is speaking to you, the reader-and in this way, adds the dimension and authority of conversation. Because his writing alludes to conversation, it is difficult to turn away from Holden Caulfield and his tale. Because the writing evokes a spoken voice it increases the illusion that Holden is real and makes it easier for the reader to grant this narrator a necessary authority:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touch about anything like that, especially my father.

It should also be noted that many fine first person novels have begun without alluding to the narrator's unique relationship to the story-without even Melville's perfunctory "Call me Ishmael"-such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which simply begins, "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains," or Updike's Of the Farm, which begins, "We turned off the turnpike onto a macadam highway, then off the macadam onto a pink dirt road," but the narrators of these novels, because of their surety and form, implicitly promise what the earlier narrators outright state, namely that 1) they have unique knowledge about certain characters or events and 2) the story which follows is of such importance that the reader should continue reading.

Second, the language and observations need to be that of the character. Language-word choice, use of phrases, etc.-especially in first person narratives opens up a character and gives him the illusion of being real. A character's language, more than anything else, helps readers understand his internal thoughts and emotions: language comes to a character through age, experience, living in a certain location, through class and parentage, through education or the lack of education, through choice in career and system of beliefs. The voice of Tom Kromer's down-and-out depression-time narrator, in Waiting for Noting-"I admire that stiff. He has got the guts. He does not like parting with his dough"-evokes his situation through the words he chooses: the words "dough", "stiff", and "guts" reveal quite a lot about his personality, about the way he understands the world and the people with whom he keeps company; the main tension of story, that of having no respectable social position and no money, is held in each sentence, each phrase, because the words themselves continually seem to be the exact words a person in this situation would use. It is easy to see how Tom Kromer's character, within his voice, holds different needs and desires than that of, say, the sharp, oddly articulate narrator of Richard Ford's Wildlife, which because of the words a phrases he uses reveals that he has all together different concerns:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that year form Lewiston, Idaho, in the belief that people-small people like him-were making money in Montana or soon would be, and he wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.

Even within this structure, there can be a variance in the styles of voices which readers will find convincing and, by their nature, hold the necessary illusion of life. As with real people, characters have more than one voice-a certain style and vocabulary used when speaking formally, another for conversation, still another for writing, and so on-all of which, for an individual character, can hold the same needs and desires but, because of various levels of diction and complexities of word arrangement, use different style of presentation. Barry Hannah's narrator, in the novel Ray, chooses to tell his story in a style close to conversation, one that is meant to appear as if the character is actually speaking to you-"Ray is thirty-three and he was born of decent religious parents, I say"-while Michael Chabon's narrator, Art, in the novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, communicates to the reader in voice which is closer to that of writing-"At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business." Both styles of narration can succeed wonderfully-indeed, styles between the two poles can as well-so long as the style remains consistent, and through its consistency builds its own authority, which is essential for a reader to believe in the existence of a narrator.

I would like to say one final thing about language, how it is used and how it establishes a character, that is about narrative distance, the time which separates a narrator's rendering of a story from the time which the story actually happened. A character who is close to the story (that is, a narrator who is telling a story which happened in the past week or month or even year) will render it in a significantly different way than he would if he was far from it (a story which happened ten or fifteen years in the past). The break-up of a teenage love will have a different meaning, different emphasis, if it is told by a seventeen year-old boy, recently heart broken, or by the same man, fifteen years later, at the age of thirty-two, when he is looking back and trying to understand the lessons of his youth.

Often the language and phrases will tip off the reader, on a tonal or subconscious level, to the actual distance between the narrator and the time story took place. In the above mentioned Wildlife, because the narrator uses the language of reminiscence, indicating many years separate the narrator from the story-"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working"-a reader would expect that, if the novel is to be believable, the narrator would make certain observations about his youth, observations true to his age and ones he could not have made at the time when the story actually took place. Conversely, a reader would expect Tom Kromer's narrator, because he gives the appearance of being very close to the events-"I admire that stiff"-not to have as a distilled or clear understanding of the ultimate importance of these events. As with anything, the addition of time changes a person's (or in this case, a character's) perception, and because his perception has been changed, even if it is only a slight change, it will also change the way he uses language.

Third, and lastly, fictional authority is gained through accurate and psychologically exact observations. The more likely the details which make up the story seem to be real, the more likely readers are to believe in the story. In Sandra Cisneros' short novel, The House on Mango Street, she so convincingly finds the voice of a young Hispanic girl who lives in a large city that is is difficult, as readers, not to believe in the narrator's reality:

We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there'd be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six-Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me.

In addition to the accuracy of the voice, Cisneros also finds descriptions which seem organic to her young narrator, Esperanza; that is, her narrator describes her world is a way a young girl would, using short phrases, simple words and observations which, if the narrator were older, would seem odd and unrealistic. For example, Cisneros' narrator describes her mother's hair has smelling "like bread" and her papa's hair as looking "like a broom," which, I imagine, are just the observations this young girl would make about her world.

Similarly, in Ethan Cannin's novel, Blue River, like Cisneros, he creates in Edward a believable human lens through which to see the story. Because this narrator's knowledge about his brother, Lawrence, is so dense and specific, it is almost impossible not to believe that the story is, in a fictional sense, true. How could a narrator know so much about another person if, in fact, that other person were not real, and once life is granted to the narrator's world it must also be granted to the narrator who occupies and describes that world:

As a boy my brother Lawrence was always hiding. He hid behind doors, under porches, in the deep shade of trees; he lay down in drainage ditches and fields of tall grass and fell asleep; he submerged himself in the Mississippi River and breathed through a short length of reed while the other boys and girls played tag on the shore. In the afternoons I was sent to find him for dinner. I was five years old the first time I went to look for him; that day he was sleeping in our back yard behind a cut stump. Later I would find him crawling in the heating duct in our basement, squatting on the limb of our maple with his head in the leaves, standing in our yard in a hole he had dug deeper than his head. I was always coming across him by surprise. In our house he walked noiselessly. He sat in the corners of rooms. He was six years old than I was, and I regarded him with reverence.

Furthermore, later in the novel, this narrator, Edward, makes observations which, in the context of the story, seem to describe the inner knowledge of the characters so well, casting them as undeniably human, that it increases our belief in the humanity of the narrator and that his life, because it is described with such accuracy and depth must be equal to our own life. When, in a trip to the zoo, the adult Lawrence throws Edward's child into the air, a playful gesture with possibly deadly results, Edward is able to create a believable psychological landscape, finding the precise thoughts and emotions that a person in this situation would think and feel:

My brother bends his arms and throws my son into the air. Jonathan. He is reaching: forward, sideways, kicking his five year-old legs. In my own chest there is an implosion of lightness and my arms go out. Catch him, Lawrence. He has turned partway forward, a half-gainer in the foggy air above my bother's head, and behind him, through the space formed by his bent waist and down the short paved hill, I see Elizabeth, looking up now also, the three of us in a line. Lawrence, catch him. Jonathan is turned completely over, falling head first, and this is the end of both of our lives, of all our lives, and then Elizabeth pus her hand over her mouth, and Johathan is still falling, and our swimming pool and our house seem to be a great distance from where we are now and, more than that, from everything we have ever hoped for, just wood and concrete and planned hedges, and then of course Lawrence puts his arms forward and catches him.

and because Ethan Canin does this, so accurately and consistently, we, as readers, have long forgotten that Ethan Canin is, in reality, controlling the narrative and have begun to believe in the existence of his narrator, Edward, as though the story were real, were history, were more personal than history, which is one of the most glorious effects in fiction, to have an audience believe in someone who is not real, to have characters, through language and description, take on the sheen of human personality and for a while affect readers as though they were alive.

copyright Todd James Pierce, 1999

Go To Part Three

Return to My Home Page ----- Email Me ----- Return to Fiction Writers Recources