If you think I’m obsessed with point of view, you’re right! I am auditing a Harvard class taught by James Wood (also a critic for The New Yorker), who has been discussing point of view in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. And in the first lecture of the class, Postwar American and British Fiction, Woods suggested that we might “want to pick up some Flaubert” and look specifically at point of view. OK, so I devoured all 275 pages of Madame Bovary.
Flaubert pioneered—or at least put on the map—the “free indirect style,” in which an omniscient narrator suddenly evaporates, entering into a character’s consciousness and representing his or her thoughts. (Check out the market scene with Emma and her lover-to-be.)
Of course, in nonfiction, free indirect style works less well. I call a writer who engages in such shape-shifting a “Wobbly Narrator.” Most writers who jump around from “he” to “you” to “I” are novices who haven’t mastered point of view, or who are afraid to pick a stance toward the material—whether the first-person singular of memoir, the second-person singular of colloquial writers reaching out to readers, or the third-person singular of the reporter concerned with credibly and precisely observing others.
Lemme find some examples of The Wobbly Narrator. I’ll post them in comments—and invite you to do the same.
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Tags:Flaubert, James Wood, point of view, pronouns, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov
September 29th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Bellow (bravo!)
Here’s Saul Bellow using the free indirect style in “Seize the Day,” when he slips from being an omniscient narrator (referring to Tommy Wilhelm in the third person) to being inside his protagonist’s head (using “I”):
“Greatly hurt, Wilhelm struggled however to be fair. Old people are bound to change, he said. They have hard things to think about. They must prepare for where they are going. They can’t live by the old schedule any longer and all their perspectives change, and other people become alike, kin and acquaintances. Dad is no longer the same person, Wilhelm reflected. He was thirty-two when I was born, and now he’d going on eighty. Furthermore, it’s time I stopped feeling like a kind toward him, a small son.”
September 29th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Bush (back to school!):
Here’s President George H. W. Bush turning into The Wobbly Narrator at a 1988 campaign stop, on the day after Halloween. (If the son couldn’t find the chemical and biological weapons, the father couldn’t find the right point of view):
“We had last night, last night we had a couple of our grandchildren with us in Kansas City—6-year-old twins, one of them went as a package of Juicy Fruit, arms sticking out of the pack, the other was Dracula. A big rally there. And Dracula’s wig fell off in the middle of my speech and I got to thinking, watching those kids, and I said if I could look back and I had been president for four years: What would you like to do Those young kids here. And I’d love to be able to say that working with our allies, working with the Soviets, I’d found a way to ban chemical and biological weapons from the face of the earth.
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Ah yes, the wobbly narrator. I’ve found that I have a secret obsession with second person. Sometimes I write journal entries in second person, but it is so difficult to remain in that person! It is even more difficult to find many published pieces entirely in second person (especially ones that do not wobble). At last, I have found an excellent short story entirely in the second person. It is “Until Gwen” from The Atlantic Monthly by Dennis Lehane. He uses second person perfectly, with such drama. The reader feels like he/she is the protagonist. It is a must read!
October 7th, 2009 at 7:43 am
I, too, am searching for wobbly narrators. (Or, did you say narratives of Wobblies?) Regardless, we scour the newspaper, the radio, the television, even books, for them. When Sarah finds one, she’ll alert Connie. Until then, we (I, you, he, she, and it) must remain vigilant in our quest.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I was doing Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” with my students today and noticed it contains 3 different POVs. He carries it off wobbly well.
November 5th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
[...] mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve [...]