imaginarycircus

I'm chipping away at Prose's book still. I find I can comfortably read about fifty pages a day. I have to stop and think quite a lot about what she is saying. I don't always understand or agree and I think she belabors certain points. Especially about reading. To be fair I have not taught writing classes for the last 25 years, so I have to give her the benefit of the doubt there. She has had way more students than I have since I've had maybe 30 over the last three years and none in the last year.

I'm most of the way through her chapter on Narration. I think this is another one of these problems novice writers have that never occurred to me. I don't know if I'm dumb or just arrogant. Maybe lucky? I hope.

I like a well done first person narrative as much as anyone else. Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books. It's an example of a first person POV that is so wonderful that the book would be boring without Holden's voice. I know many people who hate this book, but I've never understood why. I assume it is because Holden doesn't get "better." If you think he's just a spoiled solipsist--then I guess that could make the whole book loathesome.

I've come to distrust first person narrative in general, especially when it is used to create a forced intimacy with the reader. A lot of the time it is like a stranger puts his arm around me and walks me into a dank, blind alley and tells me his story all while breathing his cheap stale coffee breath in my face. Not that I want to read stories that are all rainbows and puppies, of course.

I think there must a be a good reason--narrative justification for a first person POV. Either the voice has to be spectacular, or the story cannot be told except from a particular character's POV. Prose brought up the excellent point that Dostoevsky originally sketched out Crime and Punishment as a first person narrative. Once he realized Roskolnikov was going to be delirious for stretches of the novel, he had to move it into a very close third person character limited POV.

In a way I think Hunger by Knut Hamsun suffers because of it's first person narrative. It is so much like Crime and Punishment or some of Kalfka or Camus. I understand that the first person is intentional and gives us a view of the narrator's crumbling psyche while he quietly starves to death and obsesses over whether to write about Kant or not. I just find that novel unbearably bleak in a way I never found either Camus or Kalfka's bleakest works. And I blame the first person POV. I do think that story could have been told in a very close third person and it would have given the reader a little bit of an emotional buffer.

I guess my only real point here is that first person POV should not be an accident. It should be a deliberate choice because the author knows her character's POV or voice is worth it and that the character is reliable enough or unreliable in a way that still gives the reader a good story--unreliable in a way that is clear to the reader. The reader has to be in collusion with the writer there for that to work.

If you think it's just going to be easier to tell your story from a first person POV. Stop and think about it some more. It probably isn't the kind of short cut that will serve you well in the long run.