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| Point of View as Character |
In the last blog post I looked at how Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck use omniscient viewpoints in their fiction as a principle tool of character building. Morrison's work shows us how that seemingly god-like point of view can be manipulated and flexed depending on how the writer wants us to see character. This flexibility
in third person point of view is something I want to explore more now in a brief look at Ross
Raisin’s Waterline (2011). I’ll
then turn to Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn
and a discussion of point of view as characterisation through a
close reading of that novel.
Waterline
is written in very close third person Glaswegian vernacular and follows the
decline of Mick, an ex-ship builder devastated by the recent death of his wife. The narrator ‘goes into character’ and yet
remains outside of Mick, the lead protagonist. Early in the novel, as Mick
begins his retreat from his family and his life and starts drinking heavily, he
takes to sleeping in the garden shed:
He
is cold. He has lain there with the covers pulled up all morning and there’s
nay chance he’s tweaking the door open so he’ll have to live with the smell
just – the clinging stink of a fish supper he brought back a few days ago. A
while later but he is too thirsty, and he does get up, leaving the shed to go
for a drink of water from the kitchen. (W,
p.71)
Point of view
enables us to see the world as Mick does; we can hear his voice clearly in the
text, even in this short passage. So what does Raisin achieve by using third
person? Given the extreme closeness of this narrative point of view, why didn’t
he elect to use first person? And what effect does this choice have on the way
character is choreographed in Waterline?
The use of words
and phrases such as ‘nay chance,’ ‘tweaking,’ ‘live with the smell just’ and ‘a
while later but,’ put us firmly in the hands of a distinctive colloquial voice
that filters experience with a conversational, intimate style; and yet this
third person perspective inserts a gap between Mick and the reader. The ‘clinging stink of a fish supper’ implies
judgement. We know that Mick brought it
back to the shed because the narrative tells us he did, but there is a
distancing in that phrase, signalled by the word ‘stink.’ Unlike ‘smell,’ stink suggests the unpleasant
odour associated with the kind of rough-sleeping alcoholic that Mick will turn
into later in the novel. The word is a foreshadowing, still part of Micks’ own point
of view, while at the same time separate from him.
The
third person point of view tells us something else about Mick. As we get to know him, we realise that he
would be an unlikely chronicler of his own life, would never assume to tell his
own story using the first person pronoun,’I.’ Indeed, the novel traces Mick’s
attempts to efface, even destroy, himself – at the moment when he travels to
London and moves into seedy lodgings before he starts sleeping rough, he
literally disappears to all that are known to him. He turns up sporadically on the record books
of Social Services in London and this is evidenced in a few episodic chapters
written from an institutionalised viewpoint – like Steinbeck and Morrison,
Raisin flexes the perspective when necessary. Overall, the close third person
point of view enables Raisin to construct a kind of fictional biography, while
the carefully chosen verbal ticks and colloquialisms help ground Mick and his
story within the time and place and the legacy of Thatcher’s post-industrial
Britain that is so key to the circumstances of Waterline.
James
Wood calls this close third person point of view ‘free indirect style,’ which
he says is at its most powerful when ‘hardly visible or audible’:
As soon as someone tells a story about a character,
narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge
with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking … The
narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of
the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words … Thanks to free indirect
style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through
the author’s eyes and language too. We
inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.
With
free indirect style, we simultaneously see through the character’s eyes and are
encouraged to see more than they see. This gap can be a source of creative
tension, enabling character and their worldview to be seen from different
perspectives, be that their own, how other characters see them, how the
author-narrator suggests we see them and the world of the novel.
Colm
Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) pegs free
indirect style to Eilis Lacey, the protagonist whose journey we follow as she
emigrates from Ireland to New York in the 1950s.
There is a restraint to the close third person point of view that illuminates
Eilis’s character. Father Flood, the priest who later arranges for Eilis to
emigrate, comes to tea:
He crossed his legs and sipped his tea from the china
cup and said nothing for a while. The silence that descended made it clear to
Eilis what the others were thinking. She looked across at her mother, who
deliberately, it seemed to her, did not return her glance, but kept her gaze
fixed on the floor. Rose, normally so good
at moving the conversation along if they had a visitor, also said nothing. She twisted her ring and then her bracelet. (Bk, p.23)
Subtly,
swiftly and almost imperceptibly, Eilis is ushered towards her emigration –
from the moment Rose returns from the golf club having played a round with
Father Flood to the moment he sends Mrs Lacey a letter confirming that he has
found Eilis an appointment and accommodation in New York, the narrative barely
covers three pages. The silence described in the above passage, along with the
quiet yet quick decisions that are made for
Eilis elegantly characterise her lack of control and passivity.
Narrative
point of view in Brooklyn ebbs and
flows gently between a very close, almost interior standpoint and a more
exterior, outward looking perspective (and along the delicate gradations
between those two banks). On the first day in her new job at Bartocci’s
department store in New York,
Eilis watched as Miss Fortini wrote out several
dockets for her and sent them and then waited for them to return. She then filled some out herself, the first
for a single item purchased, the second for a number of the same item, and the
third for a complicated mixture of items. Miss Fortini stood over her as she
did the addition.
‘It’s better to go slowly and then you won’t make
mistakes,’ she said.
Eilis did not tell Mrs Fortini that she never made
mistakes when she did addition. Instead,
she worked slowly, as she had been advised, making sure the figures were
correct. (Bk, p.61)
Here
we see the face that Eilis wants to show the world. Narrative point of view is
focused on tasks, enabling Eilis to demonstrate her capabilities to her new
boss. The voice is practical, wary,
contained. A similar distancing effect is achieved when we realise that the
farewell scene as Eilis sets out on her journey has been omitted from the
narrative. Instead we find her handing
her suitcase over to a ship’s porter whom she thanks ‘in a tone warm and
private but also slightly distant though not shy either, a tone used by a woman
in full possession of herself (Bk,
p.32). Although the scene is later recounted in flashback, the omission is
significant – it protects Eilis’s privacy, avoids the showy melodrama of an
emotional farewell to her mother and sister.
As we saw in Beloved, the
unsaid carries subtle power.
The
narrative perspective becomes more interior at those moments when Eilis is
least ‘in possession’ of herself. This
occurs when she recounts her dreams (Bk,
p.67), has sex for the first time with her sweetheart Tony (pp.185-7), or is at
her most homesick:
It was like hell, she thought, because she could see
no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was
strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew
that you would never see anything in daylight again. (Bk, p.70).
While the narrative
‘bends round’ Eilis throughout the novel, there is a plasticity to the point of
view that allows Toibin to create empathy and intimacy while maintaining a
distance that not only orchestrates character, but reminds us of the period,
the emigrant’s lot, the necessity and demeanour of a single girl’s
respectability. The free indirect style almost
acts as a means of narrative enquiry into Eilis’s life and character – an
omniscient point of view that moved between characters would undermine this
focus.
I recently wrote to Toibin
to ask him why he did not write the novel in first person and was surprised when he replied to me! He said:
I didn’t chose
first person because I wanted a sort of neutrality in the tone. A first person
voice always has flavour, no matter what you try and do with it. With a third person narrative, you can lead
the reader places without the reader noticing.
A first person narrative might seem indelicate to Eilis,
cause the same kind of affront that she herself feels when her landlady Mrs
Kehoe over-shares information: ‘She believed that Mrs Kehoe was giving her too
much without knowing her well enough and just now had also said too much’ (Bk, p.99). The ‘flavour’ that Toibin talks about above
locks narrative into character, doesn’t allow for the gap that enables us to
see through the character’s eyes as well as beyond them, discussed
earlier. It is not only the reader who
is led places ‘without noticing’ in close third person point of view, but also
character, as we saw with Eilis as she is shepherded onto a liner bound for
Brooklyn.
In this blogs I wanted to look in detail at the range of
ways in which narrative point of view can work to ‘catch’ character. I've learnt a lot from it that is going to help in developing my own practice as a writer.
Steinbeck
showed how the use of an omniscient narrator can personify the world of the
novel, provide sweeping panoramas that make a character of landscape, while
Morrison shows how narrative voice can be a battleground for characters: who
gets to speak, about what and when? This theme of control is key to our
understanding of Sethe’s character and integral to Morrison’s study of slavery’s
gruesome manifestations. Raisin’s novel
demonstrated how a few carefully selected words can characterise a voice that
is close to that of the protagonist and yet distant enough to accommodate
context and enable reflection on the lead’s condition; while in Brooklyn, we saw how narrative point of
view mimics and characterises Eilis’s own life experience.
Narrative point of view doesn't only work in the service of
character. It is also critical to the
overall plot, tone and style of a book, and much more besides. Point of view truly brings fiction
alive as it interlaces with dialogue and with action, as it builds and riffs on
theme and shapes the overall pattern of a novel. At the same time I think I've learnt however that narrative point of view
that is closely orchestrated around character, and the themes they embody, has
a subtle complexity and real depth that puts the ‘literary’ into fiction and which
needs a careful, certain hand to pull off.
