Who’s telling the story?

Who’s telling the story?

Unless a story is in first-person, most people will answer “the writer;” if the story is first-person, some of them will say “the viewpoint character.”  And they’re not exactly wrong … but they’re not exactly right, either.

In both cases, the writer is the one who put the words on the page, but by the time the reader reads those words, the writer is off somewhere working on something else, or at the beach enjoying a well-earned rest, or they’ve been dead for a day or a century or six. The words-on-the-page capture a sort of image of the writer telling the story at a moment in time, rather like a video, but there is distance between the words-on-the-page and the writer who wrote them. I’m not the same as the me-from-forty-five-years-ago who wrote Shadow Magic, or as the me from fourteen years ago who wrote Thirteenth Child. There’s even a bit of distance between the me who is typing these words and the future-me who will be doing something else in a few hours or days when you are reading them.

The common term for the storyteller-on-the-page is the narrator, and the very fact that there is a name for this function recognizes that the narrator isn’t automatically the writer or the viewpoint character. In novels, the first-person narrator is clearly a character, the pretend-writer of the tale, rather than the actual real-life author. David Copperfield is not Charles Dickens. But diaries, letters, memoir, and autobiography all tell the story of what has happened – they are all explicitly written after the events they describe. Most first-person novels fall into one or the other of those categories, which means there is implicitly a bit of distance (sometimes quite a lot of distance) between what happened and the point at which the first-person narrator sat down to write it. The infant David Copperfield is quite obviously not dictating the description of his birth in Chapter One; the narrator is a much older David Copperfield, musing on the circumstances of his birth and how they did or didn’t affect or presage the rest of the life he lived.

Similarly, there’s a bit of distance between even the tightest and closest of tight-third-person narrators and the viewpoint character, and that distance increases as third-person viewpoint moves from filtered to less filtered, from close to camera-eye, and eventually to the omniscient author/narrator who makes no secret of knowing everything about everyone in the story, including their futures.

An author who is aware of these differences – between viewpoint character and narrator, and between narrator and real-life author – can make use of them to cast light on the story from different angles. The most common approach, currently, is to shrink the difference between the first- or third-person narrator and the viewpoint character, so that the reader seems to be riding along in the viewpoint character’s head as the action happens, without quite becoming stream-of-consciousness. But an older first-person narrator, one who has had time to process events or find out information they were unaware of at the time, can tell their story from a wider angle. They can be conscious of the farcical bedroom-comedy aspects of the things they took so seriously in their college years, even as they recount their memories. They can be a bit melancholy as they describe the wonders of their first love, because they know they eventually lost that person. A first-person narrator can also be an observer of someone else’s story, like the narrator of Wuthering Heights (everyone I know except the English majors has to be reminded that the story of Catherine and Heathcliff’s ill-fated relationship is pieced together by the visitor/tenant Lockwood, long after the events are over).

A close third-person viewpoint can similarly be told by a viewpoint-character-narrator as if the reader is stuck in the narrator/viewpoint’s head at the moment everything is happening … but it can also be told by a narrator who isn’t quite the viewpoint character, one who is older and/or more knowledgeable. This narrator can tell an oak tree from a maple, when the desert-born-and-raised viewpoint would just say “that’s a tree.” They can point out to the reader details that the viewpoint character can see, but wouldn’t really notice or be consciously aware of. Like the older first-person narrator, they can bring a different perspective to events, mocking things that the characters take seriously or hinting at serious consequences of things the characters find enjoyable or amusing. And they can still be close enough to the viewpoint character to reveal thoughts and emotions that the viewpoint may not fully realize until later.

And then there are narrators who are distinct personalities that are clearly neither the author nor any of the characters in the story. “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a whale…” is the voice of an oral story-teller – possibly a parent telling bedtime stories to a child, or possibly a busker telling stories for money on the street somewhere. Either way, I am pretty sure that it’s not the way Kipling talked or wrote when he was just being himself. As-told-to stories are explicitly one or two removes from the actual characters – the narrator is generally a reporter or acquaintance or member of the audience in a bar, who is listening to (and writing down) a tale told by someone else (who may be telling their own story, or a story that happened “to a good friend”). These have multiple layers of narrators, who come forward or recede into the background as the author shifts focus from tale-teller to listener.

Omniscient and camera-eye viewpoints lend themselves to this kind of writing. There are also authors who, like Steven Brust in his Phoenix Guard series, make the omniscient narrator a distinct character who is neither the author nor a participant in the story. Brust’s omniscient narrator is a cranky historian of his fantasy world, whose opinions keep intruding on the story. Jane Yolen does something similar in Sister Light, Sister Dark, with the different sections told not merely from different viewpoints or by different narrators, but in completely different styles and forms (ballad, myth, poetry, legend, historical analysis), each with a very different narrative voice.

Recognizing the narrator of the story as a position that can be filled by a viewpoint character, by the author, or by a completely different character (either explicitly or implicitly) gives the writer a lot more options for telling the story.