The Technique of Fiction Writing

by Robert Saunders Dowst

There is another advantage in first person narration. Some stories cannot be launched with a rush; the significant action must be prefaced by a considerable mass of introductory matter that is essential to full understanding of subsequent events; and this introductory matter can often be made less repellent to the reader when it is artfully introduced by a narrating character. The speaking character can be made to tell his story with a smack of personality that appears somewhat affected and flippant when the writer employs the third person. This flippancy and affectation is apparent is some of Kipling's and O. Henry's work, and probably repels as many as it attracts.

Generally, throughout a story, first person narration makes easier the attainment of uniformity of style, if that be a merit in the case of all stories as it unquestionably is in the case of the short story, with its necessary emphasis on all formal unities. During the vogue of the historical novel some years ago this mode of narration was ridden to death simply because it lessens for the writer the labor of catching what he conceives to be the tone of the particular society he is portraying. As to the general matter of tone, Stevenson refers, in a letter, to "The Ebb Tide," as "a dreadful, grimy business in the third person, where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a narrative style pitched about (in phrase) 'four notes higher' than it should have been has sown my head with grey hairs." Had the story been told by one of the characters there would have been no difficulty of the sort.

"The Ebb Tide" probably could not have been told effectively in the first person, for much of its power derives from the way in which Stevenson limns the lovely South Pacific scenes through which its poor lost derelicts of people move. Their speech is "vilely realistic" because they are common men, sea captain and clerk and middle-class Englishman, and the lips of no one of them could have been made to state effectively without distortion what his eyes saw. Any story has certain matters which must be brought out justly if the whole is to have due effect, and if first person narration renders it impossible to treat such matters justly that mode of narration cannot be used. The example of "The Ebb Tide" shows that in estimating the availability of narration in the first person the writer must consider that the very nature and being of a character may seal his eyes to many matters. Moreover, the reader will not readily accept in a narrating character the literary power that is even expected in the author writing in the third person. A story is a whole, its people existing subject to the limitations of its necessities, and the mode of narration must function naturally with the rest, and not demand impossibilities.

One difficulty of first person narration is not so much fictional as psychological. If the story demands emphasis upon the good qualities of the narrator, his bravery, devotion, love, generosity, or a thousand others, a reader will soon weary of the eternal I. It is safe to say that if a character must be shown in a strongly favorable light, let it be done by the author or some other character, not by himself, unless the moral perfection of the person is a matter solely of inference from his acts.

The very complicated plot can rarely be handled well in the first person, particularly if the events cannot be cast in chronological order. On the other hand, first person narration is often a useful device to keep from the reader's knowledge, unobtrusively and without seeming effort, matters which he must not learn prematurely. Conan Doyle's Watson is an instance. Thus the chief disadvantage in employing the narrating character, that he cannot be made omniscient, may be turned to advantage. The whole question is one to be determined only after careful consideration of the demands of a particular story, and the chief need is not so much to state rules for its solution as to point out the real necessity that the writer know what he is about before pitching on a mode of narration. It is a prevalent habit, and a bad one, to accept a story as it first takes shape in the mind, narrative, point of view, and all.

There is a tendency among writers of fiction, particularly those who are just beginning, to narrate in the first person, perhaps because they feel that the reader will accept the story more readily in such shape. Other things being equal, first person narration is a trifle more natural and plausible than narration in the third person, but its limitations are much more strict. At the last of it, readers are so thoroughly habituated to the impersonal viewpoint that a writer does not gain much in power to convince by adoption of the other. A story is taken up because a story is wanted, and a reader is willing to accept the conventions of the art. So incredible a fiction as Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom" was probably best told in the first person, but the average story need not strain so sedulously for verisimilitude so far as the mechanics of narration are concerned.

Typical third person narration is illustrated by the story of action, the wholly objective story, told in the third person. The impersonal relator is omniscient, but his omniscience is not so obtrusive as in the story that touches on the facts of the soul. This omniscience of the relator is the chief advantage of third person narration, but the writer will only infrequently find it advisable to assume omniscience absolute and entire, involving knowledge of all the objective acts and the subjective motives of all the characters. If the story is largely analytical of more than one character the writer may be forced to "know it all" in order to display his material. But omniscience carried to such a point tends to be over-artificial, the underlying cause of much of the artistic weakness of the story which lays bare the souls of all characters instead of one or two of the most significant. In his own daily life the reader is accustomed to a one-sided presentation of the social spectacle, and complete omniscience on the part of the impersonal relator of a fiction has the taint of artificiality, or even of bare exposition. And exposition, which implies a mathematically complete presentation, is not fiction, which implies shading and suppression, absolute or temporary.

Any suggestion of artificiality may be entirely avoided, and the frequently necessary advantages of third person narration retained, by assuming omniscience as to all the physical facts or events of the story while rejecting omniscience as to the souls of the characters, except the souls of one or a few. Thus the writer may escape the inherent limitation of first person narration, that the story is told by a character of definite powers and knowledge, and retain the chief advantage of that mode of narration, the more or less single viewpoint, corresponding with a reader's own outlook on life and its happenings. This hybrid method of narration utilizes the virtues and rejects the vices of the two strict types. By telling his story in the third person, but from the viewpoint of one or two of the chief characters, an author may assume the desirable omniscience as to objective facts and the desirable limitation upon knowledge as to subjective motives. This is not to say that the nature of a particular story may not call for strict first or third person narration; it is merely a suggestion that the virtue of each type may be utilized at once. Each story makes certain demands, and the writer is not confined to two means of satisfying them.

A reader of any catholicity of taste can recall numerous examples of the various modes of narration, and in future reading it will be directly profitable for the writer to note the narrative device employed, and how it has aided or hampered the development of the fiction.

More extreme devices have been, and may be employed, such as Richardson's of telling a story in a series of letters. They are curious rather than important.