Remember That Narrators Select

Every sentence of narration has selected this detail, this order, this verb for what someone said, including the ones that never say “I” at all. “Said,” “admitted” and “claimed” are not the same event. Imagine a city council meeting narrated twice. In one version the council “voted 5–2 after a brief public comment period.” In the other, three residents, one of whom had waited since six o’clock, were given two minutes each before the vote. Both could be accurate, and they ask the reader to feel different things. Neutral narration, the camera eye or the plain summary of a meeting, is a tempting assumption, and a style without a first person can feel clean. A writer who thinks the narration is transparent stops auditing it.

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Ford Madox Ford’s narrator, John Dowell, says so on the first line of The Good Soldier (1915), and on the first page tells us, with a word in quotation marks, that of himself and his wife “one of us had, as the saying is, a ‘heart’,” and that his wife, Florence, “was the sufferer.” Before the first part is over he says that the one woman whose heart trouble was real “was really what the other two, for reasons of their own, just pretended to be.” By then Dowell has given us the order in which he wants the story known. Near the end he admits he has told it “in a very rambling way,” and defends the method: one goes back and forth, and “one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression.”

He is vivid, not exceptional. His order, his omissions and the way he speaks of his wife are narrative choices that happen to have a character attached, and every narrator has them.

None of this means that narrators lie or that facts are optional. The shape of an account, its inclusions, omissions, sequence and emphasis, is itself a statement. Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, ties a narrator’s reliability to the norms of the work as a whole, which he calls the implied author’s, against which the narrator’s accuracy and judgment can be measured. That moves the question from whether the narrator lies to what the work lets us see that the narrator does not. Dowell is unreliable against the work’s norms. A narrator can be reliable and still select.

Chekhov comes at the problem from the other side. Writing in 1888 to his friend A. S. Suvorin, a newspaper editor, about one of his stories, he argued that the artist should be “not the judge of his characters... but merely an impartial witness.” (The letters are in Constance Garnett’s translation.) In the same paragraph he adds that the writer’s business is “to know how to distinguish important statements from unimportant.” Two years later, defending himself against the charge of indifference, he wrote that he relies on the reader “to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.” The letters suggest Chekhov knew the impartial witness was a stance that still selects. He declined to say what the selection meant.

A reader tends to assume that what is mentioned matters and that what is absent does not, and builds a picture accordingly, so the narrator’s pattern of noticing seems to work as an argument, strongest when it doesn’t look like one. No account can include everything, though, and a narrator who stops to justify each choice is unreadable. Selection is a problem only when it is concealed from the writer. Sometimes plain reporting is the right posture, and a clear, unhurried account with a restrained narrator can be the most trustworthy one available.

Practice. Take about a thousand words of narration, your own or a passage you admire. In thirty minutes, list every category of thing the narrator notices (clothes, money, weather, bodies, other people’s feelings, sounds, the time of day) and then every category it never mentions. For each absence, ask whether this person, at this moment, would plausibly register it, and decide whether the silence is the narrator’s design (a character who cannot bear to notice grief) or your habit. If it is habit, write one paragraph that notices what the narration has avoided and see whether the work changes. For nonfiction, list which sources are quoted and which are never heard. The silences you cannot defend are the part of this narration you did not choose.