For the past two weeks, I’ve rambled about the third-person point of view and the question of whether there is a narrator — and if so, who is it?
In the first post, I looked at Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, two novels where the narrator breaks the fourth wall and introduces him- or herself. In the second post, I dug into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, two novels where the narrative presence remains hidden. Today I’ve got a few thoughts about the endpoint of the third-person POV.
Or rather, two endpoints: On one side, fiction from Henry Fielding to Henry James to James Joyce moved closer and closer to the character’s consciousness, so that you ended with subjective stream-of-consciousness. On the other side, the third-person narrator shifted from a front-and-center jolly-good-fellow (Fielding) to a carefully controlled observer (James) to an invisible reporter (Hemingway).
The Subjective: Stream of Consciousness
One read of literature is that the history of fiction mirrors the history of human consciousness. The third-person narrator gradually receded, allowing the character’s voice to appear via free indirect discourse. Then, as our understanding of psychology and subjective philosophy grew, fiction slid into the characters so that the third-person prose mirrored the character’s flights of thought. Think James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.
Take this passage about Leopold Bloom making breakfast in Ulysses:
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
This is a blend of normal third-person narration with the random stream of the character’s thoughts. The camera is zoomed in so much on his consciousness that the narrator is gone. It’s still the “third person” (“he”) but it might as well be Leopold himself narrating as he natters around.
In some stream-of-consciousness stories, the voice shifts all the way into the first-person. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a patchwork of first-person voices, floating from one mind to another, including the one-sentence chapter from Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.”
Faulkner’s novel is in the first-person POV, but who is our stage manager? There is a narrative presence constructing this collage, deciding which character’s mind to move into next. That presence is essentially the author himself — Faulkner the external mind fashioning the story by drilling so close to the characters that we only see them through the first-person “I.”
That’s one endpoint of narration.
The Objective: Hemingway’s Iceberg
The other endpoint of narration is for the narrative presence to disappear altogether (or nearly altogether). Rather than sliding into the character’s mind, the narrator becomes a camera’s eye, coldly recording a scene. We see this in Hemingway’s journalistic approach to story-writing.
His story “Hills Like White Elephants” is a fine example. The story is little more than the transcript of a conversation between a man and a woman in a café. Gradually, we come to understand they’re debating whether she should have an abortion, but the actual subject is just below the surface. That technique is referred to as his “iceberg theory. As he put it in Death in the Afternoon:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
The traditional role of the narrator — explaining, commenting, taking us into the character’s consciousness — is replaced by innuendo. Lay out the facts and let the reader interpret them.
For a sample of what this kind of narration sounds like, here’s the opening of “Hills Like White Elephants”:
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was a warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out the flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
Where’s the narrator in all of that? You could point to a few interpretive statements (e.g., explaining the curtain is “to keep out the flies”), but this is largely objective narration. The characters don’t have names, and the perspective is from the fly on the wall. Here’s some representative dialogue:
“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we could have everything.”
“We can have everything.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can have the whole world.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can go everywhere.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours anymore.”
“It’s ours.”
“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”
Other than the initial “she said,” this might as well be a transcript. The narrator has all but disappeared, yet we can interpret something of what they’re saying. The 7/8 of the iceberg below the surface is in their divergent understandings of where they are, as well as the overall moral challenge of abortion that they don’t even get into.
Conclusions?
I don’t think it’s an accident that stream-of-consciousness arose in sync with modern psychology, just as the camera’s eye approach to storytelling arose with the advent of motion pictures.
Here in the 21st century, the techniques of fiction have been around for a while. We haven’t had an innovation a la Hemingway and Joyce in a generation or more, and authors tend to foreground one approach or the other, (1) the narrative stage-direction approach moving in and out of consciousness or (2) the camera’s eye narrator.
For an example of #2, take the example of Michael Connelly’s novel The Late Show, which opens:
Ballard and Jenkins rolled up on the house on El Centro shortly before midnight. It was the first call of the shift. There was already a patrol cruiser at the curb out front and Ballard recognized the two blue suiters standing on the front porch of the bungalow with a gray-haired woman in a bathrobe.
This is written cinematically. The hardboiled “voice” matches the subject, but there’s no real narrator jazzing around with consciousness. Instead, this narrative is meant to be taken straight, like a movie (and it’s no surprise that Connelly’s work has translated so well to television).
For an example of #1, the stage-manager approach, pick almost any random “literary” novel off the shelf. I’ve got Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted near at hand, and here’s the first paragraph:
The first hint something was up was so subtle that it barely registered. Just before the start of Monday’s 4 a.m. shift, the members of Movement were in the employee area at the front of the store, waiting to clock in. Everyone was there — everyone, that is, except Meredith, the person at the center of the plot that was soon to take shape, its reason for being.
You can see the scene in the Waldman, but you can also hear the voice of an unnamed narrator, conscious of the unfurling plot. She doesn’t slide into full stream-of-consciousness, but she does make liberal use of free indirect discourse:
But Nicole couldn’t explain, not even to Ruby, who was her closest friend at the store. (Never mind that Ruby was forty-eight, the same age as Nicole’s mom, and of a different race. Who cared? Nicole’s fiancé Marcus was black too.) Still, if she told Ruby how happy leaving Meredith hanging had made her, she’d sound like she needed to get a life.
There you have it, a divergent approach to narration. On one hand a camera’s eye in which a third-person narrator is unnamed and even invisible; on the other hand an active director carefully adjusting where the camera points and how much it zooms in and out, from Tolstoy-like tale to Joycean stream-of-consciousness.
I don’t know how much this matters to everyday readers, but I suggest writers would do well to understand their method of telling a story