One of the side effects of saints is that they can make the rest of us feel crummy, or even annoyed. Here the author gets annoyed for us. “With some irritation” is the crucial phrase in the passage. One can imagine the effect if the account were recast in the third person, as in newspaperese: “Farmer said to a reporter …” The scene without the management of the self-revealing narrator would be meaningless or even absurd.
This is more than convenience, and what happens in microcosm is a model for the whole book. The author’s understanding of the subject becomes the story. Paul Farmer is revealed to us through the growing comprehension of the narrator. This is another example of the narrative of revelation.
—RT
Point of view is the place from which a writer listens in and watches. Choosing one place over another determines what can and can’t be seen, what minds can and can’t be entered. The choice also deeply affects the tone, the author’s apparent attitude toward the events and people of a story—an element of storytelling that is easiest to spot when it goes wrong and the reader senses, for instance, that the author is condescending toward a character but doesn’t seem to know it. Point of view is a place to stand, but more than that, a way to think and feel.
The main choice of course is between the third and first person, between a disembodied voice and “I” (in nonfiction synonymous with an aspect of the author). For some, the choice is made before sitting down to write. Some writers feel obliged to use the third person, by tradition the voice of objectivity, the disinterested mode of address appropriate for the newspaper or for history. Other writers, by contrast, seem to adopt the first person as a reflex, even if they are not writing autobiographically. But choosing a point of view really is a choice, fundamental to the construction of nonfiction narratives and carrying serious consequences. No moral superiority inheres in the first or third person, in their many varieties, but the wrong choice can deaden a story or distort it enough to turn it into a lie, sometimes a lie composed of facts.
One thing to consider is the scale of the story. Take, for instance, the opening of There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz:
Nine-year-old Pharoah Rivers stumbled to his knees. “Give me your hand,” ordered his older brother, Lafeyette, who was almost twelve. “Give me your hand.” Pharoah reached upward and grabbed hold of his brother’s slender fingers, which guided him up a slippery narrow trail of dirt and brush.
“C’mon, man,” Lafeyette urged.… “Let’s go.” He paused to watch Pharoah struggle through a thicket of vines. “Man, you slow.”
The two boys are climbing up a railroad embankment, looking for both adventure and relief from summer in the housing projects of Chicago. A third person hovers over this scene, an observer, but at least on first reading, we don’t think about that person. The observer could have revealed himself, reported perhaps on how he skinned his own knees following the boys. But even though we know he’s there, he remains invisible. To some readers, telling a story this way makes the story incomplete. But if Kotlowitz had revealed himself in this small opening scene, he would have had a lot of explaining to do, about his relation to the two boys and his bona fides and so on, and besides quite possibly boring most readers, all that information would have ruined the scale of the story’s beginning. It would have enlarged the field of vision and made the boys and their world smaller than Kotlowitz wanted them to seem. He wanted to invite us into the boys’ circumscribed landscape. He wanted to tell their story as much as possible from their perspective. A first-person narrator would have ruined the spell that Kotlowitz wanted to create, the readers’ illusion that they are alone with the boys.
So the size of the world that a writer is trying to create often has something to do with the presence or absence of the word “I.” Against a large background, “I” can provide human scale. Most travel writing, for instance, depends on the first person, the figure in the photograph that shows you just how tall the statue is. As a rule, the smaller the canvas, the more intrusive the first person is likely to be.
Even a complex story with multiple characters can be made more immediate by the absence, not the presence, of a first-person narrator. The disembodied voice of the third person can sometimes allow for greater intimacy with the subject than the first person, as in this passage from A Civil Action:
The lawyer Jan Schlictmann was awakened by the telephone at eight-thirty on a Saturday morning in mid-July. He had slept only a few hours, and fitfully at that. When the phone rang, he was dreaming about a young woman who worked in the accounting department of a Boston insurance firm. The woman had somber brown eyes, a clear complexion, and dark shoulder-length hair. Every working day for the past five months the woman had sat across from Schlictmann in the courtroom, no more than ten feet away. In five months Schlictmann had not uttered a single word directly to her, nor she to him. He had heard her voice once, the first time he’d seen her, but he could no longer remember what it sounded like. When their eyes had happened to meet, each had been careful to convey nothing of import, to make the gaze neutral, and to shift it away as quickly as possible without causing insult.
The woman was a juror. Schlictmann hoped that she liked and trusted him. He wanted desperately to know what she was thinking. In his dream, he stood with her in a dense forest …
Thus begins the introduction to the main character of a nonfiction book. We’re put in bed with him. Actually, we’re asleep with him, not just watching him dream but watching his dream with him. Critics and writers have a term for this technique, a term other than chutzpah. They call it the “restricted third person” or the “limited third person.” The reader sees the world as the character sees it. This mode seldom appears in pure form. More often we see what the character sees, but also see the character seeing it. It’s a technique more common in fiction, of course.
In nonfiction, the restricted third person has practical costs. The right to use it has to be earned; one can write “she thought” or “he dreamed” only if the person has confessed to the thoughts or the dreams, and only if the writer has good reasons to believe the accounts are true. Jonathan Harr spent eight years writing A Civil Action—some of them wasted in devising ways not to write, as he happily admits, but many of them spent in keeping company with his main character, ears and eyes and notebook open during the many times when nothing important was happening. Spending more time with a subject than most writers could afford or tolerate seems the only sure way of building the kind of relationship that can let a writer into someone else’s dream life.
When to prefer the first person to the third? You would almost certainly choose it if you were involved in the events you’re describing, and you would probably feel obliged to choose it if your presence had a knowable effect on the outcome. Choosing the first person can also be more nearly a matter of convenience than honesty. “I” can simply seem the more natural mode, and, in that slight sense only, more honest, less artificial. The involvement of the first-person narrator can be very light indeed. Sometimes “I” is there just to facilitate the movement of the piece: “We met in a nondescript café on the Lower East Side …” Or simply to register what is said: “He told me that he came to places like this because they reminded him of Budapest before the war …”
A variety of the first person is available for this role. One might call it the “first-person minor,” or the “restricted first person,” or the “reasonable person.” The distinguishing characteristic of this point of view lies in the limits and strictures it places on itself. As a rule, not much about the narrator is revealed, including the narrator’s opinions.
The first-person minor has been around for some time. It has long flourished at The New Yorker. You can pick it up already well established sixty years ago, with Lillian Ross and her classic profile of Ernest Hemingway—who, within range of Ross’s notebook, reveals himself to be in a punch-drunk (and plain drunk) state of defiance. Its marvelously, almost parodically urbane first line reads: “Ern
est Hemingway, who may well be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, rarely comes to New York.” The profile feels intimate, and the author does nothing to hide her presence, and yet she manages to seem unobtrusive. She assumes a rather dutiful persona. She appears when Hemingway summons her. We hear nothing of her life. If you stop reading and think about it, you realize that this might have been quite a moment for her, a writer in her early twenties who was profiling the world’s most celebrated author. A candid personal journalist could have made herself into a figure of high drama. Instead Ross makes herself seem like a stock figure of the time, the “gal Friday,” cheerful, omnicompetent, without apparent needs of her own.
Another New Yorker writer, John McPhee, has characteristically written in the first-person minor. In his hands, the limited first person, while remaining indistinct in personality, can take an active hand in things, and by acknowledging his presence, and even the effect of his presence, can help illuminate the subject. The following is a brief scene from McPhee’s book-length profile of Bill Bradley, called A Sense of Where You Are. McPhee wrote it when Bradley was a basketball star and not yet a senator. McPhee is watching Bradley practice, and Bradley misses a shot:
… the ball curled around the rim and failed to go in.
“What happened then?” I asked him.
“I didn’t kick high enough,” he said.
“Do you always know exactly why you’ve missed a shot?”
“Yes,” he said, missing another one.
“What happened that time?”
“I was talking to you. I didn’t concentrate. The secret of shooting is concentration.”
This is a utilitarian first person. It’s natural and casual, and it helps readers to see. But sometimes the reportorial first person plays a larger role, not merely useful but vital, as in profiles where the writer must take the measure of a story’s characters. Do they require an identifiable set of eyes to interpret them for the reader, to manage the reader’s reactions to them? There are moments when the first person ought to be restrained, others when the “I” is necessary as a gauge.
A somewhat revelatory first person lies on the wide continuum between the first-person minor and what might be called the first-person major. In some cases, it may seem necessary to reassure the reader about the accuracy of a story, and one solution may be a first-person narrator who reveals, even if indirectly, how the story was reported. At the extreme, of course, the author’s gradual understanding of the subject becomes the heart of the narrative. This often happens in books about places: Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Ian Frazier’s Great Plains.
In his essay “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” Mark Kramer praises journalists who tend to present themselves with an “intimate voice, frank, human, and ironic.” But this kind of intimacy is a highly stylized thing. To put it directly, the narrative “I” is a fiction. This is not to say it is a lie. It is an emblem of a personality made up of elements that the author may in fact possess or may only aspire to. As in fiction, the “I” of reportage is a constructed thing, a vast simplification of its creator.
Sometimes the “I” is really out there on the page, self-dramatizing, very present indeed. Sometimes it is the “I” of personal participation in great events or dire social conditions: Mark Twain learning his way around the mining camps of the West, in Roughing It. More recently, it’s David Foster Wallace having adventures on a cruise ship or Barbara Ehrenreich describing her taste of life as a minimum-wage worker.
Then there is the interesting case of the late Norman Mailer. He said that his book Armies of the Night, originally begun as a magazine article for Harper’s, was “history as novel” and “novel as history.” It seems like neither. It looks a lot like reportage, reportage that transforms the first person into the third. This is the book in which Mailer becomes “Mailer,” a character covering and participating in the March on the Pentagon in 1967. At moments, his deployment of the third-person-first-person feels like a prison break. You feel the liberation in it, the possibilities it opens up to be free of the oppressive “I.” The stance he affects could scarcely be more personal or more revealing, but at the same time it preserves a comic distance from the self. It is both wildly egotistical and grandly self-mocking. It might not have been possible to bring it off at all if Mailer hadn’t already made himself, through his earlier work and his outlandish (and on one occasion criminal) behavior, a public figure whom plenty of people referred to as “Mailer,” and not in the kindest way.
In fiction, another variation is possible, the “unreliable narrator.” We are meant to understand such narrators in a different way than they understand themselves. This would be a hard act to pull off in nonfiction. But one writer has come close: the late Hunter Thompson, who presents himself as a drug-and-alcohol-crazed, hallucinating madman, driving a red rental car across the desert, on the first page of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive.…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered … “Never mind,” I said, “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
In Thompson, hyperbole and fantasy don’t masquerade as objective truth but describe the inner life of a hallucinating “I.” Thompson stretches the boundaries of nonfiction, maybe to a point where they ought to be stretched now and then.
CHARACTERS
The attempt to render characters in a piece of writing, to create the illusion that people are alive on a page, is so essential to storytelling, and so dependent on every other aspect of the art, that it can’t help but seem diminished by the standard term “characterization.” That word might better be limited to perfunctory efforts. Examples of these are abundant, in fiction and in many sorts of nonfiction. Here is one, from Game Change, the most popular political book of a recent season:
The Obama brain trust—David Axelrod, the hangdog chief strategist and self-styled “keeper of the message”; David Plouffe, the tightly wound campaign manager; Robert Gibbs, the sturdy, sharp-elbowed Alabaman communications director; Steve Hildebrand, the renowned field operative behind the campaign’s grassroots effort in Iowa—was a worrywartish crew by nature.
Journalists who have to get a book written before its topic is stale may not have time to do more than this, to depict people as dolls or “action figures,” quickly and easily understood. And moving stick figures around can be enough to give a narrative shape and dramatic action, and these, along with information and especially insider information, are all that many readers expect, or require, or even want. Great writers remind us that more is possible. Here, for example, is how George Eliot introduces the heroine of Middlemarch:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.
These sentences begin the book’s opening paragraph, which is long by modern standards but does a lot of work. By its end Miss Brooke’s plain manner of dress has become not only a means of suggesting her physical beauty, but also an entrance to her family history, her social station, the character of the place where she lives, and, on top of that, her tendencies of thought and her ambitions and a suggestion of the risks that they carry. We are promised th
at if we come along, we will receive much more than the simple story of what will happen to Dorothea Brooke. The lure is those hands and wrists of hers, set off by her plain sleeves. We are given just enough material to begin to imagine her in a place and situation, and the invitation to follow her is beguiling and suggestive enough that we, like many former generations of the reading “we,” are inclined to accept.
More than any other aspect of storytelling, the successful rendering of characters depends on the reader. The goal is to get characters off the page and into the reader’s imagination. When this happens, transport follows. We readers travel in our chairs, beds, sofas, our living rooms, our carrels in the library, to a place in our minds where we aren’t quite aware that we are reading, where we wish we were like the protagonists or we say to ourselves, “Oh, God, that could be me,” where we speak to the characters—“No! Don’t do that!”—just as if those people were really here with us right now.
One might say this feat was easier in George Eliot’s time than it is today, when many other storytelling media can do the imagining for us. But they thus limit the range of possibilities—one reason that good books rarely get turned into good movies; the Captain Ahab we imagine when we read Moby Dick probably doesn’t look exactly like the Ahab any other reader imagines, and he certainly doesn’t look like Gregory Peck. When it comes to creating the illusion of human beings in stories, writers of fiction and nonfiction still have the distinctive and necessary task of getting the reader to do the necessary work of imagining.