A Container of Multitudes, or When I isn't Me by Alyce Miller
Let's face it, first person seduces. It may start with little more than a whisper in the ear: "Pssst. Come closer, I'm within you." Familiar, it mimics the insistent voice of the self-dramatized, the cathartic unstaged soliloquy of private diaries and journals, unintended for public consumption. But if we follow it into fiction, it becomes the voice of someone less familiar, even unknown, appearing with intimate urgency. "Quick," it says, "I must tell you my story. Get me down on the page before I get away." And it is all you can do to get to your pen and tablet in time.No wonder "I" is often preferred by beginning fiction writers. It offers itself so willingly. We are accustomed to dramatizing ourselves in speech and writing as "I." What could be simpler than merely transcribing the voice as it speaks?
As Eve Sedgwick points out, we are many people, and not always who we think we are. As writers, we take on roles, not unlike actors and actresses, who work to "become" the characters they portray. In other words, they inhabit personae, often very different from themselves. Persona is the Latin word for mask. The mask of the self. The mask we take on when we say we are ourselves or when we become other people. In actuality, first person is a narrative choice that allows us to inhabit, or be inhabited by, at close range, a vast array of characters, in a perfect blend of subject and object.
Consider the mask worn by Daniel Defoe when he gives voice to Moll Flanders. Consider that David Copperfield is not Charles Dickens, but an assumed identity.
Inhabiting "I" involves hearing the poetry of that particular voice and, much like dramatic monologue, it generally occurs around a dramatic incident. It involves what Charles Johnson calls "ego-less listening." The "I" of fiction is transformed out of self through imagination. The fictionalized "I" is always an enactment.
Writers have traditionally adopted personae that are very different from themselves, crossing gender, class, sexual, racial, cultural, and social lines as required. While writers of first person often speak of the importance of having empathy or understanding for every character, likable or trustworthy, or not, they also must reach beyond their own immediate experience and language to discover who the character is.
The "I" of fiction is transformed out of self through imagination. The fictionalized "I" is always an enactment.
Writing first person is not merely an exercise in lining up all the facts. It is an act of discovery, a yielding, a listening.
Personae are as varied as the color spectrum. "I" might be the voice that engages companionably, begs to be trusted: "Call me Ishmael." Or the selfpitying voice in its bid for sympathy: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard..." It is the wistful retrospective narrator reflecting on the past: "One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me." It is the voice of memoir that pledges truth: "I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life..." It is the connection to others: "After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself..." It is the amoral perpetuating its own twisted logic:
"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall..." It is the innocent child's voice matter-of factly recording without interpreting: "We didn't always live on Mango Street."
Point of view may be the single most important choice a writer makes. Who tells the story, and from what perspective? Point of view offers the controlling framework that shapes any fiction and determines its dimensions. It also establishes the tone and mood of the piece, the information known and revealed, as well as the idiom in which it's given, and the order~ ing and sequence of events. What is important to one teller may not be of interest to another. The main consideration in choosing any point of view is evaluating what will be gained and what will be lost with any teller.
First person often seems the most natural of all the points of view. It can feel less mediated than the more "literary" voice of third, which implies the presence of an "author." However, it's important for me to clarify that all "I" narratives are mediated, that lack of mediation is an illusion. Since through our daily conversations we are accustomed to narrating our own lives through "I," we may be deceived into thinking first person is easiest to write. But first per son comes with enormous challenges as well as limits.
All events and observations must be consistent with what the first person character sees, knows, and believes to be true about the world. In other words, everything is filtered through the consciousness of the narrating "I." There is little or no room for slippage in perspective the way point of view can be shifted around a little more in third. Still, this often tighter focus, which limits what can be told, can be exploited in interesting ways through implied irony, discrepancy, and contradiction. For example, let's say the first-person narrator reports something as true, but another character or a fact comes along to contradict, interesting tension arises, as well as doubt on the part of the reader who must now read more critically as the piece progresses.
Tonally, first person has endless possibilities, depending on the character in whose consciousness the story is lodged. And there are interesting ways to offset the first-person focus, through dialogue with other characters, other characters' observations, or straight reporting. All of these can give readers a control point from which to make evaluations.
The reliability of any narrator is always at stake but becomes far more critical with first person. By reliability, we refer to how much the narrator can be trusted. This often is determined by the reader's own worldview and how closely the narrator's vision compares. We tend to question the judgment of a narrator whose take on the world is very different from ours.
The first-person narrator is automatically recognized as not as "objective" as a third-person voice, since often the first person narrator has a vested interest in how the physical reader (as opposed to the implied reader) interprets the events. You as the writer will have a fairly strong sense of how closely this narrator's perceptions will line up with reader interpretations of the information as presented. A deliberate discrepancy between what the first person narrator imagines to be true and the physical reader's understanding or perspective can provide interesting distance and even enhance the conflict. Distance between reader and narrator can develop in a num ber of forms: morals, values, worldview, experience, and general outlook.
For example, I often use Eudora Welty's wellknown story "Why I Live at the P.O." in my classes to illustrate unreliability. The story plays with the instability first person allows against the elusive notion of "truth." Tonally, the first person narrator, Sister, immediately draws us into a personal and highly opinionated dialogue. In the style of a dra' matic monologue, Sister is eager to convince us that her family~ members have mistreated her, and to demonstrate that she has behaved impeccably in spite of it all.
Of course, the question is not only how much distance exists between the "I" of the fiction and the experience, but the "I" of the fiction and the reader.
Vladimir Nabakov opens Lolitaby dropping the reader into the middle of a private, impassioned reverie, evoking the "I" through a litany of posessive pronouns: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." We have no idea who's speaking or why until a few paragraphs later where' in Humbert decides to locate himself: "I was born in 1910, in Paris."
The character of Humbert could not have been written successfully in the third person. The author would have stood in the way, and Nabokov was smart enough to know that, We need the "I" of Humbert's mask, we need his own language, wice, and words, his own self-parody and self-criticism, seemingly unfiltered through a narrating voice. The illusion of an unmediated Humbert is far more powerful. Not unlike Humbert, whenever we use "I," in daily speech or in writing, we are inventing ourselves anew in a form of impersonation. Two terms are frequently used to discuss first-person stances: central and perpheral. Humbert Humbert is a good example of a central first-person narrator, one whose active consciousness is at the core of the material and whose narrating voice is indispensable from the events. It is, as we say in creative writing workshops, "his story" and his perspective. A peripheral "I" is the character as observer, who may be part of the events but does not influence them and does not become their focus. A peripheral first-person narrative suggests that the focus lies elsewhere than on the observing "I" of the story. It often is characterized by a detachment, the voice of the spectator, and may in actuality carry a certain moral weight or judgment.
The peripheral narrator Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby fits the role of observer/commentator. Somewhere between central and peripheral is the narrator of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," who claims the story is about his brother Sonny, though it is about himself in relation to Sonny, too. In fact, the change that takes place in the story (the final epiphany) occurs for the narrator, not Sonny.
Peripheral first offers the opportunity to back away from the real, unspoken "1" of the narrative and approach it at a slant. Sonny would have had no reason to narrate his own story, because he is not the one seeking understanding. Likewise, while Gatsby is the real protagonist, his mysterious past and invented present could not have accumulated with the kind of tension they do if he were the speaking "I." Too much mystery would have been explained away. Gatsby observed is far more intriguing than Gatsby as speaking agent.
On the flip side, an observed Humbert would not have worked for obvious reasons. Part of the pleasure of reading Lolitais uncovering the gaps in Humbert's logic and perceptions. The novel is, among many things, a cat-and-mouse game with the reader. The central "I," often a mechanism to engage the reader closely with a character who shares common ground, dislodges and jolts in Lolita as we are ping-ponged between hilarity and revulsion. Simultaneously amused by Humbert's critique of American consumer culture and revolted by the skewed logic of his obsession with nymphets (though the two things are cleverly related), the reader is thrown into moral ambivalence. Captivated by his intellect, wit, and charm, we are participants in an immoral discourse that openly revels in violating all dominant norms. We find ourselves complicit just in reading the book and being engaged by Humbert, making it uncomfortably impossible for us to judge Humbert without judging ourselves.
Any discussion of point of view must raise the issue of not just who speaks, but who actually sees and what it is they perceive. Narrative depends structurally on who knows what and when. Any discrepancy, either through a character's ignorance or another character's deliberate withholding of information, is the stuff of dramatic tension: misunderstanding, contradiction, speculation, and sheer invention. First person provides an interesting challenge to the writer to further that tension between speech and perception. Often it is the reader, in first-person narratives, who is given the role of perceiving what the speaker cannot.
Focus of perception is a handy term I've swiped from Gerard Genette and other narrative theorists to open up to my students the concept that point of view is far more complicated than merely identifying first, second, or third person. Knowledge, when and where and how, is key to fiction and is intricately tied to tension and conflict. It is from this tension of "who knows what and speaks what they know', that plot develops, not the other way around.
Ever heard of writing a first-person narrative without mentioning "I" at all? To achieve a very claustrophobic effect, Alain Robbe-Grillet chose an obsessive unnamed narrator for his novella Jealousy. The narrator never refers to himself as "I," but it is clearly he who speaks and who observes the mundane details of what he (falsely?) assumes to be evidence of his wife's infidelity. In the terrific novel Housekeepingby Marilynne Robinson, Ruthie, the "I" narrator, escapes the presumed limits imposed by "I" and moves frequently into a kind of omniscience through speculation and dream. This fluid and flexible use of first person allows the narrative to access other kinds of truths not necessarily based in fact. It acknowledges that all stories are invented. And that is one of the single most distinguishing advantages of fiction over nonfiction--it offers alternative truths.
In Jazz,Toni Morrison makes use of an omniscient "I," normally an oxymoron in point of view. Her narrator--ostensibly an "I" who is never named, but who is truly, in a trick of homonyms, an "eye," like a camera--expresses a point of view that seems to belong not simply to one consciousness or one experience. The "I" of the city is located in a voice that collaborates with the characters and even the reader to make sense of the events.
First person can often feel like a close relative of third-person limited, which undoubtedly shares certain characteristics. In third-person limited, as with first person, the narrative is confined to the perceptions and understandings of one main character. Unlike first person, however, limited third does give a little more breathing room, because the language belongs more obviously to the narrating voice and a separate intelligence. There is some room for subtle editorialization and authorial comment. In first, there is the illusion that the language belongs to the speaker, and it is the writer's task to not omly develop but remain consistent to the idiolect of that narrator.
The reason I suspect many contemporary writers favor "I" is that it allows us to experience a character from the inside out and automatically raises the question of reliability. In our age, reliability is always a critical issue in any narrative, political, ideological, fictional, or otherwise. Contemporary readers, no longer satisfied with being preached to or openly manipulated by an "author" in the intrusive way our l9th-century counterparts were, may actually trust the "I" more because it is easily recognized as "unstable."
This is part of the appeal of first person. To a beginning writer, the "I" voice can feel less formal, less intimidating. It opens a door and summons you to follow. "I" offers the illusion of a writer alone with the telling. It mimics the wonderful secrecy of the writer alone with "self," in all its multiplicity, whatever form that may take. Simply put the most interesting and successful "I" is "othei' discovered as "self." And for a while, as writers occupying "I," we act as both ourselves and not ourselves, as both subject and object, inhabiting our other selves a little more fully.