Part Three: Structure, Structure, Structure

First person narratives, in some ways, work differently than third person narratives because the narrator, usually a character in the story, is often aware that he is in fact telling a story, that he is arranging scenes in such a way to explain an important experience and, more importantly, bring outside readers into his fictional world. In addition to this, because the narrator is choosing to tell this experience-as opposed to any one of a number of other experiences he is capable of telling-it usually implied that this particular experience is unusually important to the narrator, that the events which make up this narrative had a profound impact on him, and by being involved in them (or simply by witnessing them) the narrator most likely changed in a significant way.

Such is true of The Adventures of Huck Finn. Huck Finn, as a character, was capable of narrating a number of stories about his life but because of the importance of this individual story, he chose to narrate it and so designated it as one of the primal defining experiences of his life up to that point. Huck Finn, as most people know, is the story about a young boy who, after staging his own watery death, runs away with a slave, named Jim, using a raft to float down the Mississippi in hopes of ridding himself of his abusive father, Pap, and at the same time securing Jim's freedom. It is a story, that although does not describe all of Huck's life, draws on its entirety to illuminate a specific set of adventures which lead, ultimately, to Huck's irrevocable change.

Loosely drawing on John Gardner's theory (found in The Art of Fiction), I will take apart Huck Finn, and show how, in large simple parts, it has been put together. The novel, as with most first person novels, is a series of situations, each one building on the last, until the novel, on both a dramatic and thematic level, reaches a point of resolution. The novel occupies a specific period of time-roughly from Huck's father's return to Jim's eventually freedom and Huck's reunion with his friend Tom Sawyer-and within this chronological structure, I would like to look at four structural elements: backstory, initial change, complication, and effect.

Most first person novels, including Huck Finn, begin shortly before (or in some cases after) a significant change has happened in the narrator's like. In this case, Huck's father has returned and, in his typically drunken and harsh manner, demands that Huck withdraw and give him the money he was earlier awarded. It is the primary job of the initial change in a novel to cause later events to happen: an initial change needs to be so significant it will, by taking on additional weight and force, propel the story to its end. The arrival of Huck's father is just the event to set up a causal reaction, which, though the novel is more complicated than this outline might suggest, works in its basic form in the following way:

1) Because Huck's father has returned and asked for money, Huck will attempt to get it, if for no other reason than to appease his father.

2) Because Huck's father is unable to get the money, he takes Huck to an island where he keeps him in a small cabin.

3) Because Huck is miserable in the cabin, he escapes, and stages his own death.

4) Because he has staged his own death he must leave town, where people assume him dead-so that he will not be found by his father-and he takes to the river in hopes that that will carry him to safety.

The above outline of Huck Finn-or at least the initial adventures in Huck Finn-begin to illustrate how a novel, in its most straight forward sense, is a series of complications: one event causes a second event, which in turn amplifies the initial tension, so that in turn that second event causes a third event, which further amplifies the initial tension, until Huck is at a point where he is, with animal blood and an axe, creating the illusion of his own death so he can escape the familial treachery of his father. It is this expansion, over many scenes, of one central tension which, in the novel form, moves a character to a point where he, because of the things he has seen or done, is at a point where he has (or soon will be) irrevocably changed.

There are, in American literature, degrees of severity of this initial change, but in most cases, this change is near the start of first person novels, and furthermore, this initial change is placed there for the primary reason to set off a series of causal complications: In The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, leaves the familiar midwest for the alien-yet-exciting New York, where he is an outsider; Salinger's Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, begins his story shortly before he is expelled from Pencey, a prep school in Pennsylvania; and in Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, the novel's narrator, Neil Klugman, meets the rich and self-absorbed Brenda Patimkin and over the following chapters slowly is absorbed into her world and family. Each one of these initial changes, because of the severity of effect on the narrator, forces the story to move into an extended dramatic line, which, although certain scenes may momentarily wander from the central tension, unite the novel as a whole work, give it its center, and define its main tensions.

This, then, is the relationship between plot and character in a first person novel. The plot, those things which happen to the character, must be of such a nature that force the character to change. When the plot-for example, the return of Huck's father-is applied to a character, in this case, Huck, it makes the character act in a way, which if the character were left in his comfortable everyday life, he would not regularly act. In fact, without the return of Huck's father, Huck would never fake his own death then escape the town, by rigging together a raft, and move down stream. Plot, finally, becomes a function of change, and the novel, in most cases, because of this, is the dramatic illustration of the adventures (or consequences and complications) of a character after he has been placed into a uncommon or unsettling situation.

There must be an intimate and unique relationship between character and plot. Together they function over time to create story. If a writer is of the nature where he first invents a plot, he must then find the corresponding character who would be adequately and interestingly affected by this series of events, or, as is probably more common, if the writer first creates a character he must then, through trial, error and insight, find a plot, and more importantly an initial change, which would affect this character at a deep level and make him act in a way, no matter how subtle, he would not regularly act.

Initial change and further complications are the most important elements in developing a main story; the backstory, then, is the instrument with which readers are able to interpret the large dramatic events: backstory explains a character's nature-what he wants, who he is, what has he done up to the point where the novel begins-so that readers will be able to understand the significance of the of the main story. Because backstory is important knowledge for readers, novels often include the backstory in early section of a novel.

There are, I think, four main ways which backstory is introduced into a novel: scene, exposition, dialogue, and tone. A writer may use one or a number of these devices (or if the writer is particularly inventive may find a new way to introduce backstory). In Robert Boswell's novel, Mystery Ride, which is about the reunion of a family, the author uses full scenes (flashbacks) to render backstory: through scene, readers see this family, before divorce, so when the family again comes together in the novel's main story, the author will not need to explain the importance of individual events-how the characters were once in love and may still be in love-because the readers, from reading the earlier scenes, will know how to interpret these events. In Huck Finn, an example of exposition, the narrator tells us about his life, without dropping into full scene-how he has lived with the Widow Douglas, his troubles at school, the importance of his friends since he does not have a full family-so that when Huck's father returns, readers can understand, without being told, the troubling nature of this event. At the opening of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has assembled characters into a room, under such an occasion, that they talk about their shared history, probably one of the most difficult tricks to realistically pull off at the start of a novel, and through their conversation, we understand them, their past and desires. Finally, a more recent strategy, tone alone, in some first person works, accomplishes much of the work of backstory: the narrator in Phillip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Neil Klugman, has such a specific and unique voice, that of a young Jewish man living in New Jersey in the 1950s, that readers-simply by his word choice, patterns of speech, and by the things which he chooses to observe and participate in-can understand a great deal of his past, that he was brought up in a working class family and that, through education and luck, he hopes to live beyond the traditional boundaries of his family. Even within these parameters, there are different ways, different strategies, of delivering the backstory: some novels deliver it most of it at once, through a long section of exposition or the use of flashbacks, while other novels sift the backstory through the opening sections of a novel, usually the first third, though occasionally backstory may continue up until a novel's conclusion.

A novel's conclusion, then, is a culmination of all of the events which have come before: it is the point where, in a first person novel, a narrator usually has changed so completely and irrevocably that he can never again be the person he was at the novel's start. If the narrator has a sufficient amount of self-awareness, of both the story's structure and its meaning, he may understand this change, or if the narrator, for whatever reason, does not quite understand the story-not enough time has passed, for example, from the time the story happened from the time he chooses to tell it-he may not understand its importance, though it should nevertheless be apparent to readers.

The events in a story, when causally linked together in a plot-one event, because of its force, causes the next event, deepening the novel's tension, until the novel reaches a place where the initial tension is both dramatically and thematically resolved-should eventually move a character to a point of change, which also ends the tension caused by the initial change. At the opening of Goodbye, Columbus, Neil meets meets Brenda, falls in love, and at the novel's conclusion, he looses her. In The Great Gatsby, Nick heads east to learn the bond business, to take a small piece of the great American dream, and at the novel's conclusion, he sees how this dream has, in a way, killed Gatsby; afterwards, he returns home, significantly changed. Huck Finn runs-away from his father and, by the novel's close, it can be argued, has rejected many of his father's views and has, in ways, learned to trust his own opinion and take responsibility for himself, thereby, becoming his own parent or, at least, alleviating some of his need for a father.

The novel, then, at least in its most traditional sense, has an arc: the initial change, being of sufficient magnitude, puts a particular character, grounded in backstory, in a situation where he will pass through a series of scenes, each one both caused by and deepening the tension found in the initial change, until the tension of the initial change is finally satisfied, along with the tension of any subplots, and the character has changed in a significant and irreversible way. I would like to add, in somewhat of a conclusion, that this form, this method of storytelling is a story in its most basic form and seen by some, because of its linear nature, to be more consistent with a male understanding of narrative; writers, everyday, seek to expand, improve and alter its form to fit individual stories and styles.

copyright Todd James Pierce, 1999

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