146 Characters And Viewpoint

kept trying to go out onto the street and spread all our family business all over the neighborhood, and I couldn't let her do that, could I? You wouldn't either, man, and don't tell me you never hit your woman a little bit harder than you meant to, what with her mouthing off.

We may not love this character, but we know him better from hearing his version of his actions than we ever would by hearing them described by someone else. This passage ostensibly defends the narrator's mistreatment of his wife, but in fact it reveals very clearly his monstrous misconception of the way other people think and feel. That's one of the best reasons to use first person-to let us live for a while in a strange or twisted world, to see the world as someone else sees it. Yet because the narrator is not the author, but rather a character, the readers know that the author doesn't necessarily agree with the narrator. In fact, in this passage, if I handled the irony properly, it should be clear to a late-twentieth-century reader that the author is completely out of sympathy with the narrator.

NO FOURTH WALL

A third-person narrator flits like an invisible bird from place to place- readers don't usually spend much time worrying about how she happens to know all this stuff, or why she's writing it down. The narrator is a storyteller, plain and simple; we ignore her, and listen to the tale.

But the first-person narrator is physically taking part in the story. Therefore, he must have some reason for telling the story. By implication, he must also have some idea of who his audience is. Even though you, the author, may be maintaining a fourth wall between your characters and your readers, he, the narrator, is not keeping that fourth wall between himself and the audience he thinks he's telling the story to.

The most common way of dealing with this problem has always been the frame story. Several people gather, conversing; one thing leads to another, until one begins to entertain or inform all the others by telling the main story. No one expects anything significant to happen in the frame- it's just an excuse for the first-person narrator to tell his story to an audience that is not the reader of the book. The frame is told in third person; only the tale-within-a-tale is told in first person.

You know of many examples, I'm sure. Rudyard Kipling used the device often; H. G. Wells's The Time Machine has a frame story, as do countless tales-told-in-a-bar. One drawback is that such stories are oral, and so you deny yourself the use of formal written language. Another problem is that since the story opens with the frame, if the frame is dull the audience may never get to the story you really care about.

The frame is not the only way to deal with the fact that the character is narrating a story. Some first-person stories are told as epistolaries, letters from one person to another (The Color Purple, for instance). Some are cast as speeches, diary entries, essays, explanations to ajudge, confessions to an analyst (remember the punchline at the end of Portnoy's Complaint?) The narrator's purpose in writing may be to tell a curious tale, to persuade

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the presumed audience to a course of action, to excuse the narrator for some crime. Or the narrator may be explaining why he admires his friend, who is the protagonist of the story-which is presumably the reason why Watson set down his tales of Sherlock Holmes and Archie Goodwin told us of the exploits of Nero Wolfe.

In choosing a first-person narrator you should have in mind what his reason is for telling the tale; tale-telling is part of his character. Whether you explain her purpose or not, knowing it yourself will help you shape and control the presentation of the story; it will help establish which events the character would tell and which she would leave out, which she would lie about and which she would tell straight.

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS

What? Your first-person narrator might lie? Of course. But if you mean him to be a liar, you must find ways to let your audience know that he is unreliable.

The easiest way is to have him get caught in one lie and admit it-the audience immediately begins to suspect him of lying about other things, too. Even then, your audience has a right to expect that you, the author, will let them know which of the narrator's statements to believe and which are lies.

One way to clue in the audience is to establish another character, not the narrator, whose word we trust, and let her corroborate the key events that really happened. Usually this corroboration takes place in scenes within the story, but some storytellers go to the extreme of letting this more reliable narrator take over the first-person narration part of the way through.

Switching first-person narrators in mid-story is usually ineffective and always difficult, because it violates the illusion that the character is "really" telling the tale. But if you find you must change narrators, it helps to give your readers some clue. For instance, if the first eight chapters are narrated by Nora, you might put in a division page that says, "Part I: Nora." When Pete takes over as narrator, again you put in a page that is blank except for the words "Part II: Pete." Or you could establish multiple narrators in a frame-both characters are present in the bar or the courtroom, and we expect both to tell their parts of the story.

More difficult than changing to a more-reliable narrator is the technique of letting us know the truth of the story by implication. The narrator is lying about the things that matter to him; you must therefore carefully let us know his motive for lying so that we'll know which parts of his story would need to be faked to accomplish his purpose. Is he concealing the facts about his own crimes? Then you can lead us to doubt his words concerning his own alibi or his own reaction to the crime. Is the story a letter in which the narrator is trying to persuade another character of his faithful love for her? Then obviously we will doubt his story about what actually went on when he was alone in the room with her rival.