I want to say a few words about point of view and narrative strategy in fiction, starting with Henry James, from whom I learned so much when I first began trying to teach myself a little about the art of fiction.
James was a master of first person narrative and past master of a tight limited omniscient point of view, so much so that at times his limited omniscience virtually becomes stream-of-consciousness narrative, as in The Golden Bowl.
These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled; with other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself, those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions—to the idea in particular of a change, such a change as she didn’t dare to face, in the relations of the two men. Or there were yet other possibilities as it seemed to Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things of evil when one’s nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the predicament of the nightwatcher in a beast-haunted land who has no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of anyone; anything, almost, of poor Bob Assingham, condemned to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father’s wine; anything verily, yes, of the good priest as he finally sat back with fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach.
Here is stream-of-consciousness a decade before James Joyce and Virginia Woolf perfected the techniques necessary for a full immersion in the mind of the protagonist. What James’s prose illustrates is that stream-of-consciousness is on a continuum from the loose limited omniscience of a story like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” to the brilliant full-blown stream-of-consciousness of Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Andre Dubus III’s The House of Sand and Fog. It is just as apparent to anyone who has done much reading that there are different varieties of stream-of-consciousness—indeed, there can be more than one variety in the work of a single author, as witness the vast difference between the narrative styles of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.
Teachers of the art of fiction prefer first-person narrative now. If you do it any other way, they are likely to say, “Where is the ‘I’”? But there are a range of options available when you are considering narrative strategy. Indeed, omniscient narrator is a viable option, though it has fallen out of favor. If you do choose first person narrative, you have, as with third person, a battery of choices. There is the “I” that virtually falls out of the narrative for most of the story, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; and there is the first person narrator who is the center of all the action, as in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you feel that that must exhaust the possibilities, consider James’s story “Brooksmith,” where the narrator is omnipresent but is simply reporting and speculating on sightings of Brooksmith. A few moments’ thought will show you that there are innumerable possibilities.
Another option for narrative strategy, whatever point of view you take, is to tell the story in present tense, as Anthony Doerr does so brilliantly in All the Light We Cannot See. This can be done in either first or third person—or even second person in a fairly short piece (such a strategy would get tiresome, I believe, in a novel).
You can even make up narrative strategies. A striking example of this is a short story I read recently (I don’t recall where I read it) that was told in the first person by way of single sentences—or at most two—divided by rows of stars, with the sentences not falling into a regular this-happened-and-then-that-happened pattern, They were disconnected, yet they added up to a powerful narrative. Another outstanding example is the long stretch of dialogue in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! between Quentin Compson and the Canadian Shreve McCannon. The passage is from Quentin’s point of few, but most of the verbiage comes from Shreve, who in long inductive questioning keeps saying in effect, “Do you mean to say?”; after each spate of which Quentin simply says, “Yes.” Quentin’s one-word replies have the effect of exclamation points and drive the passage as much as does Shreve’s grandiloquence.
Yet another strategy is to let dialogue drive the narrative, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Montresor is seeking revenge for the “thousand and one injuries” of Fortunato. He meets him during the madness of the carnival season when Fortunato is very drunk. Fortunato has a weak point. He “prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine.” As the men meet, Fortunato accosts Montresor with excessive warmth, and the latter feigns such pleasure in meeting his enemy that he can never leave off wringing his hand. At this point the dialogue takes over and drives the story right through to the end.
I said to him—“My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably well you are looking today! But I have received a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my doubts.”
“How?” said he. “Amontillado? A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of the carnival!”
“I have my doubts,” I replied, “and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain.”
“Amontillado!”
“I have my doubts.”
“Amontillado!”
“And I must satisfy them.”
“Amontillado!”
“As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchesi. If anyone has a critical turn, it is he. He will tell me—“
“Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry.”
“And yet some fools would have it that his taste is a match for your own.”
“Come, let us go.”
“Whither?”
“To your vaults.”
From here, Montresor leads Fortunato to his doom through the dialogue. Most of my readers have probably read this story at some time in their lives. At the end of the tale, Montresor fetters Fortunato to the wall at the end of a niche and closes his enemy into the enclosure with bricks and mortar. The last words of Fortunato are “For the love of God, Montresor!”
Narrative strategy is limited only by your imagination. There is a lot more to be said on this topic, but I am constrained by space and my ability to hold the words of this blog post within reasonable bounds. I hope, though, that I have given readers a thought or two that is useful, or—perhaps—a bit more than useful.
David Massey has a Masters Degree in English Literature After 1660 from The University of South Carolina and, while there, studied creative writing under George Garrett and James Dickey. He turned rather belatedly to fiction writing as a serious occupation but has made progress of late, having two stories published in 2017.
