Reading · Good Trouble: The Art of Storytelling

For most readers and writers, the joy of fiction is the way a reader can develop an intimate relationship with a fictionalized character with as much depth as they might with their best friend. One of the writer’s methods for creating intimacy with the character is to allow the reader to enter the character’s deep personal thoughts in tense, resonant scenes. What, though, can the writer do to control the distance between the reader and the character?

Third-person point of view, subjective (close), follows the protagonist as closely as first-person narration, but offers the thinnest of films between character and reader, creating a relationship in which the reader can shift through multiple roles: witness, participant, and judge. The author has more control over the use of exposition and fact, while allowing the characters to speak for themselves at the most opportune times. The author allows the character to speak for themselves through the Free Indirect Style.

For the purpose of our discussion here, we’ll use this definition from the Oxford Companion to English Literature :

a way of narrating characters’ thoughts or utterances that combines some of the features of third-person report with some features of first-person direct speech, allowing a flexible and sometimes ironic overlapping of internal and external perspectives. Free indirect style (a translation of French style indirecte libre) dispenses with tag-phrases (‘she thought’, etc.), and adopts the idiom of the character’s own thoughts…).

As David Jauss proposes in his essay, “From Longshots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction, this use of Free Indirect Style allows the narrator to translate the character’s thoughts and feelings into the character’s own language. As a result, the character becomes a form of “co-narrator”, even though, properly speaking isn’t speaking at all. (Jauss 2)

The distinction here is that the tense of the character’s language must be altered to adhere to the tense of the language used by the narrator to create a unified and singular form of point of view, so as not to jar the reader. For example, unlike dialogue, which is reported in the present tense, Free Indirect Style is reported in the past tense as it is being reflected through the narrator’s point of view. Take this sentence from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story “World of Gas.”

This millennium business was just another distraction to keep men from being any goddamned use whatsoever. (Campbell 3)

Notice that if this were presented through dialogue, the tense would have been in the present by using the verb is instead of was. Though this is a subtle shift in tense, it makes the reader aware that there is a narrator outside the character and that the narrator is using the Free Indirect Style to reflect the character's thoughts and feelings without filtering them through the narrator’s consciousness. Jauss points out,

“As the distinction between narrator and character blurs, the distance between them shrinks, and so does the distance between reader and character.” (Jauss 2)

For this reader, it is the writer’s task to create such a blur of distance that I can believe in the intimate existence of the character as I read a novel or short story.

For some readers, in Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road, there is no difference between the author’s voice and that of the protagonist, Frank Wheeler. Or the reader often wrongly assumes that Frank doesn’t have his own voice at all in the narrative and therefore is only an object of Yates’s satire, a judgment of the times, and an indictment of Suburbia. On the surface, this argument seems true, but, as with most things, if the book is given closer study, it’s Yates’s voice that disappears, and Frank’s becomes our guide throughout the story. This mixture of exposition from the narrative voice and Frank’s voice, achieved through the subtle blending of the Free Indirect Style, creates empathy for the characters, propelling the story to the moment of April’s tragic decision.

What Yates accomplishes here is an act of balance between exposition, dialogue, and Frank’s thoughts in a dizzying array of craft, all of which allows us further inside the character of Frank as he tries to dodge the assaults of life upon his mind. Yates never goes too far into the narrator’s voice without returning to Frank and his specific take on the plot events.

Here he is, toiling in his front yard, moving, lifting, sweating, and trying to fend off his children’s inquisitive questions. All of this is as accurately portrayed visually as any movie. Still, it is Yates’s confidence in the voice of Frank’s internal visage that shows the reader just how immediate prose can be compared to film.

“Daddy?” Jennifer said. “How come mommy slept on the sofa?”

“I don’t know. Just happened to feel like it, I guess. You wait here, now, while I go and get another stone.”

And the more he thought about it, as he plodded back up through the trees behind the house, the more he realized that this was the best answer he could have given, from the standpoint of simple honesty and as well as tact. She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that, after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life? (Yates 4)

This small section eliminates the distance between the character and the reader by focusing fully on Frank’s unique way of thinking about his world. Frank’s diction and syntax are not being filtered through the voice of the narrator. Yates steps aside and gives us a view of Frank at his most vulnerable, his most intimate. Frank becomes more than words on a page; he becomes a human being, not merely because he struggles to deal with his children, but by the particular way he convinces himself that he is doing the right thing. A discerning reader realizes that Frank is rationalizing, creating a new truth of events, for his children, and more importantly, for himself.

Because Yates’ use of Frank’s voice and the voice of the narrator is so subtle, we have to look deep inside the prose and pick out each word and hold it up to the light for inspection. Yates transitions from the narrator’s voice to Frank’s by using the impersonal pronoun he four times in a single sentence.

“And the more he thought about it, as he plodded back up through the trees behind the house, the more he realized that this was the best answer he could have given, from the standpoint of simple honesty as well as tact.”

Even this sentence, with its use of the impersonal pronoun, cannot deny Frank a say in what is happening in the description of the plot. By the end of the sentence, we’ve moved into Frank’s head. This is evident in the way we can hear Frank’s voice in the words honesty and tact. Even though we’re only forty-seven pages into the novel, we understand that these words come directly from Frank’s unique perspective. The narrator’s voice has dropped out of this sentence, letting Frank start to speak for himself.

Here we’ve found Jauss’s example of blurring between the narrator and Frank. Yates completes this transition from narrator to Frank in the next sentence by repeating the answer he gave the children. We know this is in Frank’s voice because otherwise it would be a complete break in Point of view, giving the reader a jolt into the character that is not even in the scene, in the middle of a paragraph. If we’re not yet convinced, Yates uses the most identifiable technique of the Free Indirect Style: the rhetorical question.

For example, the next two sentences read: “Wasn’t that, after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?”

Here, we can confidently say that this is from Frank’s perspective, because a narrator does not need to ask such a question, as they already know the answer. The use of the rhetorical question is a guise for creating the reality of thinking. It is the storyteller’s tool to show the reader inside the character’s head quickly and economically, without resorting to the at-times unreadability of stream-of-consciousness. The point of Free Indirect Style is to allow the blurring of character and narrator, but to still allow the writer the choice of when to use the narrative voice to provide necessary detail through exposition.

So how, then, does Yates get back to narrative control? Well, in this section, Yates uses Frank’s remembrance of a direct line of dialogue from April from a time before they were married.

“I love you when you’re nice,” she’d told him once, before they were married, and it had made him furious.”

Conceivably, we are still within Frank’s head, but the narrator has taken control again by presenting the start of a flashback in the form of dialogue. If nothing else, the reader must rely on dialogue presented directly in the true voice of that particular character; even a third-person point-of-view narrator would not hold up to the standards of reliability. This is not something a reader should be concerned with in the work of the modern novel.

Therefore, let’s look at the exposition tagged onto the end of the dialogue. Once again, we’re back to the use of impersonal pronouns, denoting a shift in voice back to the narrator, and just in case we’re not convinced, the sentence ends by telling, rather than showing, how Frank felt.

Some writers may even have continued the flashback in this manner of telling rather than showing, but Yates didn’t allow the narrator to do so. As soon as the dialogue is presented, the next paragraph starts again with the reader inside Frank’s head. “Oh. She’d made up her mind, all right.” From this point until the end of the flashback, Yates blurs the voice of the narrator and Frank so much that it’s hard to say who is speaking at any given time. And the question is: why shouldn’t Frank’s voice be heard, why shouldn’t he—as the focus of the narrative—be allowed to tell his story for the reader? He should, to a point, be given this control until the narrator is needed, until something absolutely has to be explained before the story can move forward.

It has been said many times, by many different authors, that the short story should be written in such a way that every word and every sentence matters, that to take away a single word would cause the story to come crashing down like a tower of blocks or a building with a bad foundation. If this is the case, then where does the use of Free Indirect style come into play in a fragile, author-controlled story arc?

Part II coming soon!

Inhabiting Character (Part 1)

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