On Narrators
It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten up on my Pretentious English Major soapbox. But I just finished a book that I really, really, didn’t like, and I think it’s because of the narrator.
There are all kinds of narrators in fiction. You’ve got your third-person narrator, your first-person narrator, the omniscient narrator who knows everything. Among first-person narrators, there are a lot of options, but the most interesting ones to me are the ones who are unreliable, who force the reader to figure out what is really going on. These narrators are unreliable for many reasons: some are just too self-involved, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s books (I recommend When We Were Orphans); others have medical conditions that don’t allow them to see outside themselves, such as in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (a Sherlock Holmes reference, btw). There are narrators that you are meant to dislike, as in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Then you have what I am now calling the “WTF!? Narrator.” The one that makes you keep reading because you think, this guy can’t really be this dumb, can he? He can’t be this passive. The one who, if he were a relative of yours, you’d grab him and bang his head against a wall. But you keep reading in the hope, the very distant hope, that at some point, somehow, he’ll get his act together. Only to find out, no, he really is that dumb, that passive, that incapable of putting two and two together, and incapable of defending himself against the world as well. That’s Sam Pulsifer, the narrator in An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. He’s the kind of narrator that makes you finish the book, put it down, and start ranting about narrators on your blog. I guess as a gimmic, it’s genius. I mean, the author got me to read his book and then write about it, didn’t he? On the other hand, I feel manipulated somehow. As though the author played a dirty trick on me and now there go several hours of my life that I’ll never get back. Thanks a lot, Brock Clarke.