'Catch Me If You Can' - Point of View as Character II

Creating the sun and moon ...

Following on from last week's post on point of view and how it works as a tool of characterisation, it seems to me that as a direct line into (and out from) the mind of the voice speaking in the text, it's pretty clear how first person narration articulates our sense of character as readers. So here, I want to look at how third person narratives do this - how do we get up close to the lead when the voice telling us their story isn't their own? How - and why - do novelists use, say, an omniscient point of view: the all seeing, all knowing, God-like eye, to get us involved in the lives of their characters? 

John Steinbeck’s iconic novel of the Great Depression, Grapes of Wrath (1939) uses an omniscient narrator to track the lives of the Joad family as they move from Oklahoma through the Dust Bowl to California in search of work.[1]  The novel opens with a panoramic, scene-setting chapter which focuses entirely on the landscape and ‘the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air’ (GW, pp.1-2). There are no individual human characters in that first chapter, although the language used to describe the landscape personifies the world of the novel, where the sun shines ‘fiercely,’ the rain clouds ‘hurry on’ to another county, the wind ‘digs’ around the corn and the weeds ‘edge back towards their roots’ (GW, pp.1-3).  Steinbeck’s narrator sweeps like the wind past archetypes that are simply called ‘the men’ and ‘the women.’ The effect of this narrative point of view on character (such as it is at this stage in the novel) is twofold –the landscape itself is characterised as a living, all-powerful, mighty thing which will be as central to the story as any of the Joads; and the inhabitants of that landscape are confined to their homes and yards by the dust storms, cowed by the conditions created by poverty, greed and drought.  Right from the very start of the novel, Steinbeck orchestrates his themes of power/powerlessness, fellowship, resilience, and so on, through what is seen and how it is seen - that is, through narrative point of view.

Chapter Two introduces Tom Joad, the lead protagonist, who we meet on the roadside returning home after his release from jail. This alternation between close-ups of character in action and generalised, panoramic sweeps over the broader social and natural contexts of the novel sets up the pattern of Grapes of Wrath.  Very direct, physical narrative descriptions and dialogue create character.  The boldness of Tom Joad is clear from the start as he walks from the roadside to a ‘huge red truck,’ sees that there is a sticker warning ‘No Riders’ in the windshield, and yet goes ahead and sits down on the running-board of the vehicle (GW, p.5). His clothes are ‘cheap and new,’ his ‘coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man’:

His cheekbones were high and wide, and strong deep lines cut down his cheeks, in curves behind his mouth.  His upper lip was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips stretched to cover them, for this man kept his lips closed.  His hands were hard, with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells. The space between thumb and forefinger and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus. (GW, p.6)

And so it goes on. The narrative voice provides no insight into Tom Joad’s thoughts or feelings, but instead we are given clues to his character through these physical descriptions. Why is he wearing new clothes?  Clearly, he has not chosen these garments for himself, but rather has been given them or has been forced to wear them (we do not yet know that he has been released from prison). His face and body is weathered, the signs of hard physical work scoured into his features; and he keeps his ‘lips closed.’ Tom Joad is not a man given to unnecessary speeches.  We read these clues to try to understand Tom Joad in the same way as the truck driver, who later agrees to give him a ride, does.  Throughout the chapter, point of view remains exterior to Tom Joad who, defensively, never allows the reader in. On the single occasion when the perspective moves inside character, it is to that of the truck driver and at the prompt of Tom Joad’s dialogue, which subtly reveals his control of the situation:

The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. ‘Didn’t you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?’

‘Sure – I seen it.  But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.’

The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer.  If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company.  If he took in the hitch-hiker he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was being trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out. (GW, p.8)

Here, then, we can see how Steinbeck uses an omniscient point of view to create character – primarily through the ‘direct methods’ of action, dialogue and description, with occasional and brief digressions into reported thought. Given the narrator’s omniscience, those digressions veer in and out of a range of characters’ thoughts and are not restricted to a particular individual, as it is in close third person point of view. In later chapters of the novel, Steinbeck makes forays into the (often highly poetic) first person monologues of unnamed characters, as in the car salesman of Chapter 7 who says, ‘watch the woman’s face. If the woman likes it, we can screw the old man,’ (GW, p.69). Why does Steinbeck do this? The gathering voices of the novel underscore the sense of a vast crowd of migrants heading west; they provide atmosphere, texture and cadence that modulates the epic journey of Grapes of Wrath. These shifts in perspective also work to underscore the characterisation of the Joad family by strengthening the sense of their dispossession, the fragility of their hope, their smallness in the vast cacophony of the Dust Bowl.

The novelist Toni Morrison often uses omniscient narrators in her fiction. Perhaps because she is dealing with a defining moment of American history - like Grapes of Wrath - her novel Beloved (1987) is narrated from an all-seeing, omniscient – ‘historical consciousness’ - point of view, or so it seems.[2] Like the ghost-child of the novel’s title, the narrator moves in and out of the consciousness of the three lead characters, Sethe, Paul D and Denver; it moves freely in time and space, can tell us what happened elsewhere, in another time; it can judge and reflect and expose. The choice of omniscient narrator might be read as a political one for Morrison: such narrative consciousness gives voice and agency to the disempowered slave infant murdered by her own mother – and confers on Black History the same authority assumed by white, mainstream history (a construct that will be disrupted).  It is a voice full of beauty and rage, power and tenderness, cruelty and horror: an embodiment – a characterisation - of Slave(ry) itself.

Morrison has said of her characters:

I take control of them. They are very carefully imagined.  I feel as though I know all there is to know about them, even things I don’t write – like how they part their hair. They are like ghosts. They have nothing on their minds but themselves and aren’t interested in anything but themselves.[3]

            Point of view and characterisation in Beloved are skilfully controlled. From the opening, ‘124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom’ (Bd, p.3), the omniscient, authoritative voice characterises the women at Bluestone Road as matter-of-fact, robust – and haunted:

Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behaviour of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air.  For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light. (Bd, p.4)

Point of view moves almost seamlessly in and out of the minds of different characters, on one page revealing how Baby Suggs wondered it had taken ‘her grandsons so long’ to flee the house, on the next that Sethe had felt the ‘welcoming cool of unchiselled headstones’ as she allowed the stonemason to rape her in return for carving ‘Beloved’ on her daughter’s grave (pp.3-4). In a few short phrases, we are introduced to the wicked, contemptible loads that have been borne by these characters and the very brevity and lightness of touch with which these experiences are described has the effect of suggesting profound stoicism.

There are moments in Beloved where characters wrest control of the narrative from the omniscient voice. This takes place in Part Two of the novel when the extreme, protective jealousy and love between Sethe, Beloved and Denver reaches its height and ‘the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds’ (Bd, p.199). The women are given their own (first person) voices with which to speak.

There are also moments when the omniscient narrator takes over or pulls back from a close study of the action at 124 Bluestone Road from the viewpoint of the characters inside.  Crucially this occurs when Sethe is in the midst of infanticide and we see her through the eyes of the ‘four horsemen,’ the men from Sweet Home who have come to recapture their escaped slaves:

Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels of the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere – in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at – the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch of its mother’s swing. (Bd, p.149)

Point of view ensures that we see Sethe here as the white slave owner characterises and judges her - simian, unnamed, voiceless, savage.

Morrison uses narrative perspective in Beloved to orchestrate a 360° view of her characters, to understand the many forces acting upon and influencing an individual’s choices, be that Sethe’s decision to kill her own child or Paul D’s to return to Sethe at the end of the novel and ‘put his story next to hers’ (Bd, p.273).  Like Steinbeck, she flexes and breaks through the omniscient voice at carefully chosen moments, not only for the purposes of what Steinbeck called ‘counterpoint, rest, contrast in pace and color,’ but to deepen our understanding of, and empathy for, character, and to extend the exploration of the experience of enslavement. [4]

In the next post I want to move in closer and look at the nuts and bolts of how an intimate third person consciousness works and will do this with reference to two contemporary British novels.

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[1] John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath (1939; London: Heinemann, 1990 reprint) – this edition subsequently referenced as GW.

[2] Toni Morrison Beloved (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987) – this edition subsequently referenced as Bd.

[3] Toni Morrison ‘The Art of Fiction’ Paris Review Interviews II (London: Canon Gate, 1997), p.376.

[4]  John Steinbeck interview ‘The Art of Fiction No. 45’ (1969) Paris Review - available http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3810/the-art-of-fiction-no-45-john-steinbeck

Hinterland - Review

I was looking forward to this book - so felt disappointed at it's over-written early pages and feared here would be one more fetishisation-of-suffering through aesthetics book.  But no, it soon settles down to tell the story of two brothers travelling overland from Kabul to London and it does this very well, detailing the many obstacles that they find in their way, the small victories, the small mercies. It is, as Barbara Trapido commands us on the cover, 'a story everyone should read.'

There are times in the narrative, however, when you feel very distant from the characters - as if they are acting out their lives underwater - and I think this is a danger of any such book: Western journalist ventriloquises the experience of small-town Afghan boys.  I ended up feeling very uneasy about this.  As a reader and as an activist on human rights, I want this book to be read and for the story to get the attention it deserves.  As a writer, however, I struggled to take seriously the close third person point of view, the slide into first person at the close of the book: whose stories are these, whose voice is speaking, where does the power lie?

'Catch me if you can' - Point of View as Characterisation in Fiction I

Virginia Woolf once famously wrote that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’[1] Her deliberately provocative - yet apparently glib - remark grounded the shifts in ‘human relations’ reflected in fiction in the historical realities of the early twentieth-century and contextualised ‘what novelists mean when they talk about character.’[2] Woolf’s essay is an extended discussion of the treatment of character and ‘reality’ in novels of the preceding two centuries, as well as an appeal for a renewed focus on character (rather than on what she calls the ‘fabric of things’).  What interests me is that Woolf argues the form of the novel has specifically evolved to ‘express character’ and how methods and techniques, such as narrative point of view, are used in the service of that expression.

Through my own developing practice as a writer, I have begun to explore how character ‘works’ in fiction.  What narrative techniques can be called upon to develop and orchestrate, or ‘catch,’ character? Which devices best serve the writer who wishes to make character the central focus of their fictions – as opposed to, say, ideas, arguments or beliefs?  

As writers, we might choose to present character through how they look, what they wear, how they sound and talk, why, when and to whom – as well as what they choose to say.  Voice, style, detail also contribute to the portrayal of character. Characters are revealed in action, are capable of making action happen as well as responding to it. Indeed, the action of most novels is driven by character in conflict – be that conflict between characters or between a lead character and the various obstacles in the way of achieving their goals and desires.[3]

Fiction also has the unique ability to tell us about character through the representation of their thoughts and reflections. We can enter a character’s mind and share in the train of thought that might lead them to this or that action, to speak in such and such a way, to have this or that epiphany. Aristotle wrote that thought is the process by which character determines the action needed to achieve their ultimate goal.[4] In fiction, such thought can be presented in a number of ways – directly, indirectly, through summary – and the degree to which that thought is revealed is determined through narrative point of view.

‘Perspective,’ from the Latin for ‘to look through’ first meant an optical glass or telescope in English.[5] The narrative perspective is this lens or eye – and, by extension, the mind behind the eye – through which a story is told.  As Paul Magrs puts it:

Every piece of writing comes from a particular point of view. Choices have to be made as to who is writing and from where. One of the things to be clear about, from the very start, is that you are adopting a specific and consistent point of view and that you are doing it for a reason … Who is telling us this story? … What can they see? What can they know?[6]

In first-person narratives – those written using the personal pronoun ‘I’ –  point of view is allied to that of the narrator, who is also a character.  Reliable or unreliable, at the heart of the action or in the margins, we can only see or know what they see or know: the world of the story is contained within their perspective.  Similarly, in (rarely used) second-person narratives, point of view is restricted to the narrator who addresses ‘you,’ the reader-as-character.

Third person narratives, however, can be more or less distant from the point of view of a particular character in the story, or even entirely outside of character. The classic typology of third person point of view goes something like this:

Omniscient	Narrator is ‘God-like’ in their panoramic view of the fictional world. They can move in and out of character(s), interpret characters’ appearance, speech, actions, thoughts; move freely in time and space – tell us what happened elsewhere, in the past or what will happen in the future; provide general judgements, reflections and truths. The omniscient voice is not embodied in any one character.  It is often found in the classic narrative voice of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and other nineteenth-century (social) realists.
Limited Omniscient or Close Third Person	Narrator is more closely bound up in the action of the novel with a more deliberately limited omniscience.  Point of view may be restricted to a single character or group of characters; language and word choice may reflect that of the central character and yet there remains a gap between the narrator and character/action. Jane Austen’s work is an oft-cited example of limited omniscience.  It is also used frequently in contemporary fiction.  James Wood has called this close third-person perspective ‘free indirect style’ – a description to which I’ll return later in these blog posts.[7]
Objective Author	Narrator restricted to recording external facts grounded in sight, touch, taste, sound and smell; similar in point of view to a bystander or witness of events unfolding before them. There are no direct revelations about characters or comments on the action. Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ reports what is said and done by an arguing couple using the objective author’s perspective.[8]

I’m particularly interested in how narrative point of view augments and strengthens our sense of character, how it exposes and choreographs action and thought.  As the above typology suggests, in third-person fictions character is not reducible to narrator – they are not necessarily one and the same thing. And yet, this method of narrating story has the ability to develop character in complex, subtle and sophisticated ways. [9] So how does this work, and what can I learn from it as a writer? It seems to me that understanding this dynamic is critical to my own developing practice. While first person narration builds (and locks us into) character through the use of a direct voice, the sharing of experiences, thoughts and reflections ‘at source,’ third person inevitably does the work of characterisation in different ways. In the next blog post, I'll be focusing particularly on examples of omniscient and limited omniscient point of view as characterisation in a range of examples from fiction to try to grasp how this might work.

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[1] Virginia Woolf ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ in Collected Essays.  Ed. Leonard Woolf., Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1966), pp. 319-337.  4 vols. 1966-67. ‘Catch me if you can’ – the phrase used in the title of this essay, is taken from Woolf’s piece.

[2] Ibid.

[3] For an extended discussion on these ‘direct’ methods of characterisation (appearance, action, dialogue, thought), see Janet Burroway & Elizabeth Stuckey-French Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft Seventh Edition (London: Longman, 2007), pp.80-136.

[4] Aristotle Ars Poetica Trans. Penelope Murray, (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

[5] Northrop Frye et al eds., The Practical Imagination (London: Harper Collins, 1987), p.1412.

[6] Paul Magrs ‘Point of View,’ in Julia Bell & Paul Magrs, Eds., The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 2001), p.135.

[7] See James Wood How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2008).

[8] See Burroway & Stuckey-French, op. cit., p.299 for discussion.

[9] For an extended discussion of the differences between ‘agency’ and point of view, see Steven Cohan & Linda M. Shires Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 1988), pp.83-112.