The Narrator and Narrative Space
Dear Friend,
I’m glad you encourage me to discuss the structure of the novel, the framework that sustains the fictions that dazzle us as harmonious and living entities, their persuasive power so great they seem all-encompassing, self-generated, and self-contained. But we already know that that is only what they seem. Ultimately, it is not what they are: the magic of their prose and the dexterity of their construction only manage to give that illusion. We’ve already discussed narrative style. Now we must consider the ways in which the elements of the novel are organized and the techniques the novelist employs to invest his inventions with the power of suggestion.
The variety of problems or challenges that those who set out to write fiction must confront may be divided into four major categories, as follows:
- narrator
- space
- time
- level of reality
That is to say, the ability of a story to surprise, move, uplift, or bore us depends as much upon the choice and handling of the narrator and three points of view, all closely interwoven, as upon the effectiveness of the story’s style.
Today I’d like to discuss the narrator, the most important character in any novel and the one upon whom, in a way, all the rest depend. But first of all we must clear up a common misunderstanding: the narrator—that is, the person who tells the story—must not be confused with the author, the person who writes it. This is a very serious error, made even by many novelists who, having decided to tell their stories in the first person and deliberately taking their own biographies as their subject matter, believe that they are the narrators of their fictions. They are mistaken. A narrator is a being made of words and not of flesh and blood, as authors tend to be; the former lives only within the confines of the story that is being told, and only while he is telling it (the boundaries of the story are those of his existence). The author has a much richer and fuller life, which predates the writing of a particular novel and survives it. Even while he is writing a novel, it does not entirely occupy his existence.
The narrator is always a made-up character, a fictional being, just like all the other characters whose story he “tells,” but he is the most important because the way he acts—showing or hiding himself, lingering or surging ahead, being explicit or elusive, talkative or taciturn, playful or serious—decides whether we will be persuaded of the reality of the other characters and whether we will be convinced that they are not puppets or caricatures. The behavior of the narrator establishes the internal coherence of a story, which, in turn, is an essential factor in determining its power to persuade.
The first problem the author must resolve is who will tell the story. The possibilities seem endless, but in general terms they may be reduced to three: a narrator-character, an omniscient narrator outside and separate from the story he tells, or an ambiguous narrator whose position is unclear—he may be narrating from either inside or outside the narrative world. The first two types of narrator are the most traditional; the last, on the other hand, has only very recently been established and is a product of the modern novel.
To determine which the author chose, one must just check which grammatical person the story is told in: whether it is a he or she, an I, or a you. The pronoun tells us what space the narrator occupies in relation to that of the story. If the narration is from the point of view of an I (or a we, a rare case, but not unheard of; remember Citadelle by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or many passages in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), the narrator is inside the narrative, interacting with the characters of the story. If the narrator speaks from the third-person singular, he is outside the narrative space and is, as in so many classic novels, an omniscient narrator modeled on an all-powerful God, since he sees everything—no matter how big or small—and knows everything but is not part of the world he proceeds to show us from the outside perspective of his soaring gaze. And what space is occupied by the narrator who narrates from the second-person you, as the narrator does, for example, in Passing Time by Michel Butor, Aura by Carlos Fuentes, Juna the Landless by Juan Goytisolo, Five Hours with Mario by Miguel Delibes, and many chapters of Galíndez by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán? There’s no way of knowing beforehand; the answer may only be sought by examining the way the second person is employed. The you could be spoken by an omniscient narrator from outside the fictional world who goes about giving orders and commands and imposing his word as law, causing everything to happen in obedience to his will and the fully fledged, limitless powers he enjoys as an imitator of God. But the narrator might also be a consciousness turned inward and speaking to itself through the subterfuge of the you, a somewhat schizophrenic narrator-character who is involved in the novel’s action but disguises his identity from the reader (and sometimes from himself) through the device of the split personality. In novels narrated by second-person narrators, there is no way to know for sure, and the answer must be deduced from internal narrative evidence.
The relationship that exists in all novels between the space the narrator occupies and the narrative space is called the spatial point of view, and we say that it is determined by the grammatical person in which the novel is narrated. The possibilities are three:
- a narrator-character who narrates in the first-person singular, a point of view in which the space of the narrator and the narrative space coincide;
- an omniscient narrator who narrates in the third person and occupies a space independent of and separate from the narrative space; and
- an ambiguous narrator, concealed behind the second person, whose you might be the voice of an all-seeing and all-powerful narrator decreeing from outside the narrative space the course of fictional events or the voice of a narrator-character involved in the action who, whether timid or conniving or seized by schizophrenia or mere whim, reproduces himself and talks to himself as he addresses the reader.
Broken down in this way, I imagine the spatial point of view seems very clear, something identifiable by a simple glance at the first few sentences of a novel. That is true if we limit ourselves to abstract generalizations, but when we consider specific cases we discover that multiple variations fit within the scheme, permitting each author, having chosen a certain spatial point of view from which to tell his story, to avail himself of a wide range of innovations and variations, thereby assuring his originality and freedom.
Do you remember how Don Quixote begins? No doubt you do, since its first line is one of the most memorable in literature: “In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall…” Following our system of classification, we see that the narrator of the novel occupies the first-person singular, that he speaks as an I, and that he is therefore a narrator-character whose space is the same as the story’s. Nevertheless, we soon discover that although this first-person narrator makes an appearance every so often (as in the first sentence) and speaks to us as I, he is not at all a narrator-character but rather an omniscient, God-like narrator who, from a lofty exterior perspective, narrates the action as if he were narrating from the outside, as a he. In fact, he does narrate as a he, except in a few instances in which he shifts to the first person and reveals himself to the reader, speaking from the perspective of an exhibitionistic and distracting I (since his sudden appearance in the middle of a story in which he plays no part is a gratuitous spectacle and distracts the reader from what is happening). These shifts or leaps in spatial point of view—from an I to a he and an omniscient narrator to a narrator-character or vice versa—alter the narrator’s perspective or distance from the narrative and may or may not be justified. If they aren’t justified—if the shifts in spatial perspective only serve as a self-congratulatory demonstration of the narrator’s omnipotence—then the incongruity introduced conspires against illusion, weakening the persuasive power of the story.
But these shifts also give us an idea of the versatility a narrator may enjoy and the transformations he undergoes, modifying with his leaps from one grammatical person to another the perspective from which what is narrated unfolds.
Let’s have a look at some interesting cases of versatility, of those spatial shifts or transformations of the narrator. Take the first sentence of Moby-Dick, “Call me Ishmael.” Extraordinary beginning, isn’t it? In just three words, Melville manages to awaken in us a lively curiosity regarding the mysterious narrator-character whose identity we can only guess at, since it’s not even certain whether Ishmael is his name. The spatial point of view is certainly very well defined. Ishmael speaks in the first-person singular; he’s a character in the story, though not the most important one—that role is reserved for the fanatical, possessed Captain Ahab or perhaps for his enemy, the maddening, ever-present absence that is the white whale he pursues—but he either witnesses or participates in most of the adventures he recounts (those he doesn’t, he hears of secondhand and transmits to the reader). This point of view is rigorously respected by the author throughout the tale, but only until the final episode. Up until that point, the coherence of the spatial point of view is complete because Ishmael only tells (and only knows) what he is able to know as a person involved in the story, and this coherence strengthens the persuasive power of the novel. But in the end, as you’ll recall, there comes the terrible moment when the fearsome sea beast becomes aware of Captain Ahab and the sailors on the Pequod. From an objective point of view, and to preserve the internal coherence of the story, the logical conclusion would be for Ishmael to succumb along with his companions. But if the logic of this development had been respected, how would it be possible for someone to be telling us a story when he dies at the end of it? To avoid this incongruity and to keep Moby-Dick from turning into a ghost story told by a narrator speaking from beyond the grave, Melville has Ishmael survive (miraculously) and informs us of his fate in a postscript to the tale. This postscript is not written by Ishmael himself but by an omniscient narrator, separate from the world of the narrative, an omniscient narrator who occupies a different, greater space than the narrative (since from it he can observe and describe the space in which the narrative unfolds).
I hardly need point out something you’ve surely already realized, which is that these shifts in narrator are not unusual. On the contrary, it is common for novels to be told (though we might not always notice it at first) not by one narrator but by two or sometimes several, who relieve each other every so often, like runners in a relay race.
The most obvious example of this narrative handing off—of spatial shifts—that occurs to me is As I Lay Dying, the novel in which Faulkner describes the Bundren family’s trip across Mississippi to bury their mother, Addie Bundren, who wanted to be laid to rest in the place where she was born. The trip has biblical and epic qualities, since the cadaver begins to decompose under the merciless sun of the Deep South, but the family presses on undaunted in their journey, animated by the fanatical conviction that Faulkner’s characters tend to possess. Do you remember how the novel is told, or, to be more precise, who tells it? Many narrators: all the members of the Bundren family and others as well. The story passes along through the consciousness of each of them, establishing peripatetic and multiple points of view. The narrator is, in all cases, a narrator-character, involved in the action and settled in the narrative space. But although in this sense the spatial point of view remains unchanged, the identity of the narrator changes as the narrative is transferred from one character to the next, so that in this novel—unlike in Moby-Dick or Don Quixote—the shift is not between one spatial point of view and another but between one character and another, and requires no exiting of the narrative space.
If these shifts are justified and lend the novel a denser and richer verisimilitude, they are invisible to the reader, who is caught up in the excitement and curiosity awakened in him by the story. On the other hand, if they don’t work, the effect is the opposite: their artifice is laid bare, and they seem forced and arbitrary to us, straitjackets squeezing spontaneity and authenticity out of the story’s characters. This is not the case with Don Quixote or Moby-Dick, of course.
And neither is it the case with the marvelous Madame Bovary, another cathedral of the novel genre, in which we also witness a fascinating spatial shift. Do you remember the beginning? “We were in class when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.” Who is the narrator? Who is speaking to us in the person of that we? We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that it is a narrator-character whose space is the same as the narrative’s space and who is a witness to what he is telling since he tells it in the first-person plural. Since the narrator is a we, the possibility cannot be discounted that it is a collective character, perhaps the group of students whose class the young Monsieur Bovary joins. (If you’ll allow me to cite a pygmy alongside the giant Flaubert, I once wrote a novella, The Cubs, from the spatial point of view of a collective narrator-character, the group of neighborhood friends of the protagonist, Pichulita Cuéllar.) But it could also be a single student, who discreetly, modestly, or timidly speaks as “we.” In any case, this point of view is maintained for only a few pages, over the course of which we hear that first-person voice relating an episode two or three times and presenting himself or herself unequivocably as a witness to it. But at a moment difficult to define—the subtlety is evidence of another technical feat—the voice ceases to be that of a narrator-character and shifts to that of an omniscient narrator, distant from the tale, located in a different space, who no longer narrates as we but in the third-person singular, as he. The shift is from one point of view to another: in the beginning, the voice is that of a character, and then it becomes that of an omniscient and invisible God, who knows all and sees all and tells all without revealing or describing himself or herself. This new point of view is rigorously sustained until the end of the novel.
Flaubert, who developed a whole theory of the novel in his letters, was an unflagging champion of the invisibility of the narrator, since he maintained that what we have termed the autonomy or self-sufficiency of a fiction requires the reader to forget that what he’s reading is being narrated; he must be under the impression that it is coming to life in the act, as if generated by something inherent in the novel itself. To create an invisible omniscient narrator, Flaubert invented and perfected many techniques, the first of which was an adherence to the neutrality and impassibility of the narrator. Commentary, interpretation, and judgment represent intrusions of the narrator into the story and are signs of a presence (in space and reality) different from the presences that make up the reality of the novel; the intrusion of the narrator destroys the illusion of self-sufficiency, betrays the accidental, derivative nature of the story, and shows it to be dependent on something or someone external to itself. Flaubert’s theory of the “objectivity” of the narrator—objectivity being the price paid for invisibility—has long been followed by modern-day novelists (though often they do not realize it) and that is why it is perhaps no exaggeration to call Flaubert the first writer of the modern novel, tracing between it and the romantic or classical novel a technical divide.
That is not to say, of course, that because the narrators of romantic or classical novels are less invisible and sometimes all too visible, those novels seem defective or awkward to us or lacking in power of persuasion. Not at all. It means that when we read a novel by Dickens, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, or Thackeray, we must resituate ourselves as readers, adapt ourselves to a different spectacle from the one we’re used to in the modern novel.
This difference has to do especially with the different ways in which an omniscient narrator manifests himself in modern novels and in novels that we call romantic or classical. In the former, he tends to be invisible, or at least discreet, and in the latter, a distinct presence, sometimes so overbearing that as he narrates he seems to tell his own story and sometimes even takes what he is telling us as a pretext for unbridled exhibitionism.
Isn’t that what happens in Les Misérables? One of the most ambitious narrative creations of the nineteenth century—the golden age of the novel—Les Misérables is steeped in all the great social, cultural, and political events of its time and in all of Victor Hugo’s personal experiences over the nearly thirty years he spent writing it (he returned to the manuscript several times after abandoning it for long intervals). It is no exaggeration to say that the novel includes a formidable display of exhibitionism and egomania on the part of its narrator. The narrator is omniscient, technically separate from the world of the narrative, observing from outside the space where the lives of Jean Valjean, Monseigneur Bienvenu, Gavroche, Marius, Cosette, and the other abundant human fauna of the novel intersect. But in truth, the narrator is more present in the tale than the characters themselves: possessed of a proud and overbearing nature and seized by an irresistible megalomania, he can’t keep from constantly revealing himself as he presents the story to us. Often he interrupts the action, shifts into the first-person singular from the third to weigh in on whatever he likes, pontificates on philosophy, history, morality, and religion, and judges his characters, mercilessly condemning them or praising them to the heavens for their civic-minded and spiritual inclinations. This narrator-God (and the epithet was never better employed) not only gives us constant proof of his existence and of the lesser and dependent status of the narrative world but also reveals to us—besides his convictions and theories—his phobias and sympathies, proceeding without the slightest discretion or precaution or scruple, convinced of the truth and justice of everything he thinks, says, or does in the name of his cause. In the hands of a less skillful and powerful novelist than Victor Hugo, these intrusions would entirely destroy the novel’s power to persuade. The intrusions of an omniscient narrator constitute what contemporary critics call a “rupture of the system,” a series of incursions introducing incoherencies and incongruencies liable to vanquish all illusion and strip the story of credibility in the reader’s eyes. But that’s not what happens in Les Misérables. Why not? Because the modern reader rapidly becomes accustomed to the intrusions and feels them to be an intrinsic part of the narrative system, of a fiction that is really two stories intimately intertwined and inextricably bound up together: the narrative that begins with Jean Valjean’s theft of silver from the home of the bishop Monseigneur Bienvenu and concludes forty years later when the ex-convict, redeemed by the sacrifices and virtuous deeds of his heroic life, steps into eternity; and the story of the narrator, whose embellishments, exclamations, reflections, judgments, whims, and sermons constitute the intellectual context, an ideological-philosophical-moral backdrop to the text.
Might we, in imitation of the egocentric and impulsive narrator of Les Misérables, pause here to summarize what has been said about the narrator, the spatial point of view, and the space of the novel? I don’t think the digression is unwarranted, because if everything has not been made clear I’m afraid that what I have to say next, encouraged by your interest, commentary, and questions, will seem confusing and even incomprehensible—and it’s hard to make me stop in the middle of any discussion of the fascinating form of the novel.
In order to tell a story in writing, all novelists invent a narrator—their fictional representative or agent—who is as much a fiction as the other characters whose story he tells, since he is made of words and only lives for and as part of the novel he inhabits. This character, the narrator, may be situated inside the story, outside it, or in an uncertain location, depending on whether he narrates in the first, third, or second person. The choice is not random: the narrator’s distance from and knowledge of the story he is telling will vary depending on the space he occupies relative to the novel. It is obvious that a narrator-character cannot know—and therefore, cannot describe or relate—matters other than those credibly within his reach, while an omniscient narrator can know everything and be everywhere in the narrative world. Whichever point of view is chosen, therefore, it is accompanied by a set of conditions, and if the narrator fails to abide by those conditions, the novel’s power to persuade is impaired. Conversely, the closer the narrator keeps to the limits the spatial point of view imposes, the stronger the power of persuasion and the more real the narrative will seem to us, imbued with the “truth” that all great lies passing as good novels seem to possess.
It must be stressed that the novelist enjoys absolute freedom when he sets out to create his narrator. In other words, the distinction between the three possible types of narrator does not in any way indicate that their spatial placement limits their attributes or personalities. In a few examples we’ve seen how omniscient narrators—the all-seeing, God-like narrators of a Flaubert or a Victor Hugo—differ from one another, never mind narrator-characters, who are as infinitely variable as fictional characters in general.
We’ve also seen something that should perhaps have been mentioned explicitly from the start, something that for the sake of expository clarity I didn’t bring up but that you likely already know, or have discovered reading this letter, since it is evident in the examples cited. Namely: it is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator. Most common is that it should have many, a series of narrators who take turns telling the story from different perspectives, sometimes from the same spatial point of view (that of a narrator-character, in books like La Celestina or As I Lay Dying, which function like stage plays), sometimes from shifting ones, as in the examples from Cervantes, Flaubert, or Melville.
We can push our analysis of the spatial point of view and the spatial shifts of narrators a little further still. If we move in with a magnifying glass and make a meticulous freeze-frame examination (this is a terrible and unacceptable way to read a novel, of course), we discover that shifts take place not only in a general manner and over long stretches of narrative time as in the examples I’ve used. They can be swift and very brief, lasting barely a few words, in which the narrator undergoes a subtle and inconspicuous spatial shifting.
For example, whenever dialogue between characters lacks formal attribution, there is a spatial shift, a change of speaker. If, in a novel featuring Pedro and María and narrated by an omniscient narrator outside the story, this exchange is suddenly inserted:
“I love you, María.”
“I love you too, Pedro.”
then in the very brief instant in which Pedro and María declare their love for each other there is a shift: the narrator ceases to be omniscient and becomes a narrator-character involved in the narrative (Pedro and María), and within the spatial point of view of the narrator-character there is another shift between the two characters (from Pedro to María), after which the story returns to the spatial point of view of the omniscient narrator. Naturally, these shifts would not have occurred if that brief dialogue had been formally attributed (“I love you, María,” said Pedro. “I love you too, Pedro,” replied María), since then the story would have been consistently narrated from the point of view of the omniscient narrator.
Do these infinitesimal shifts, so rapid that the reader doesn’t even notice them, seem insignificant to you? They are not. In fact, nothing is without importance in the formal domain, and it is the sum of these tiny details that decides the excellence or lack of merit of a work of art. What is evident, in any event, is that the author’s unlimited freedom in creating and manipulating his narrator (moving him, hiding him, exhibiting him, bringing him into the foreground, pushing him into the background, turning him into different narrators or multiple narrators within a single spatial point of view, or leaping between different spaces) is not, nor can it ever be, arbitrary, but must find its justification in the novel’s power of persuasion. The shifts in point of view can enrich a story, give it depth, give it subtlety, make it mysterious, ambiguous, multifaceted; or they can smother and crush it if instead of causing events to multiply of their own accord in an illusion of life these displays of technique—mechanical tricks in this case—give rise to incongruities and gratuitous complications or confusions that destroy the story’s credibility and make evident to the reader its origins as mere artifice.
I’ll hear from you soon I hope.