Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "third-person"

I like giving a special narrator voice to many of my stories. Whoever's telling the story is rarely me, as such, and often has comments to give on the events and may or may not be entirely reliable. Sometimes it makes for a good part of the story, other times it's just a gimmick.

I feel like in this case it might be the former, but I'm having a hard time finding someone to take over the narrator's role. Something to think about.

I mean, one of the characters narrates his own adventures... but I don't think that really counts.

I spoke about narrators a few days back, in particular about how I had some trouble coming up with one for this story. I still have some trouble, sure, but I also mentioned that a lot of the story is also narrated by one of the characters, telling a tale of his own. I'd like to talk more about that today.

He's pretty unreliable.

Unreliable narrator can be a great thing to spice up the story, with a caveat that I'd like them to be established as such very early on, their lies and deceit brought out on the table right away rather than made into a twist at the end (the reasons for this might be worth another blog post later). It throws the whole story into question, forcing you to think about what is real and what isn't, scrutinize everything that happens, compare it to other things, and quite potentially come to great many different interpretations of truth that could make for a great subject for debate if you and some friends have read the same work.

But there's another appeal in them that really gets to me - one that may have much less potential for deep and meaningful storytelling, but that instead is just plain fun. Because they work both ways: they make you doubt everything you hear in the story, sure, but by the same token they also completely throw away all the worldly limitations, laws, and rules. After all, you can't trust that the guy isn't lying!

Now, anything goes. There are no limits, because it's easy to just brush it all away as the narrator lying, embellishing things for effect, misremembering, or just having gone crazy. This story-within-story has no need to adhere to any limitations or to any obligations of being taken seriously. Now you can dive deep into fairy tale and fantasy, to a far greater extent than your setting and story conventions would normally allow - and in my personal opinion, you should! Go for the whole hog! Bring forth the weird, and the wondrous, and the utterly unbelievable! The high magic and monsters in a low-fantasy world! The spaceships and robots in a realistic crime fiction! The friendly tigers and ocean lightshows in a castaway survival tale! (Really, Life of Pi has a lot going for it for other reasons too.)

And at the end of the day, the final question is also reversed. An unreliable narrator can make you ask "How much of this was real?"... but it can also get you to wonder "How much of this was a lie...?"

These past few years I've become increasingly convinced that the narrator should always be a character within the confines of the story, even when it's not told in first person. Someone had to record all these events for the later generations to read, after all. And that someone can't be just me, as I was never there to witness it. Otherwise I might as well be making it all up. Right?



They might be the main hero, as is the case with the true first-person narrative. They might be a sidekick or a follower or some other hang-around, witnessing the events first-hand but having a lesser impact in them all. They might be some historian or chronicler that heard of the events later on, or researched them well after the fact, then finally jotted them down. They might be a sorcerer watching it all from afar through their crystal ball, or some god or other high entity looking down from their cloud.

And yet none of them are entirely reliable, nor trustworthy. The main hero may be lying to make themselves look good, or if they're truly heroic, to downplay their efforts and impact. Their follower's perception might be skewed by wide-eyed hero worship, or by grumpy cynicism and the idea that they alone see the hero's flaws. Either one of them may forget stuff. The historians will of course have a puzzle to put together with several pieces mismatched, fitting to same spots in different ways, or missing altogether. Even the truly omniscient cosmic beings may have their priorities in the wrong order, might decide to skip something interesting or important while paying inordinate attention to something we humans would find completely irrelevant, or might pick sides and praise someone in-story while beating down somebody else, and you might no longer be certain if these events happened how they did.

Sometimes there's more than one narrator. One of my long-term projects involves a knight, his squire, and their retainers going out into the wild. Each of them keeps a journal, and each one gives a different interpretation of the events - sometimes these vary wildly and it's up to the reader whom to believe. Another is narrated by an ill-educated mercenary, who can't actually write and thus has recruited this old nun to scribe it down for him - and they both have their priorities and prejudicies that occasionally clash. I feel that both stories have things to say, that I'm challenged by writing them and improve myself in doing so, and that I'm having a jolly great time with them.



And of course, the view will depend on whether the narrator is actually present in the scene or not - and allows for interesting possibilities where they show up in the middle of it. I'm still a bit proud of the little trick I did where the narrator suddenly swooped in and rescued the main heroes from a bind. If the story's been third person up until that point, this sort of a thing can make for an effective twist.

Many people say that one advantage of first-person narrative is how it gets us straight into the head of the protagonist, to hear what they think and feel what they feel. I don't know about this one. Doesn't close third-person already do it well enough? If that's all you want, then I think you may as well stick with third-person and keep it real close, like what Harry Potter does. True first person view brings with it more opportunities, outlined above, yet also the responsibility of making it seem like it was written down or told to someone long after the fact, else there's dissonance that will throw me off out of it. All too much of first-person literature fails at doing either one of these, which is a shame and a missed opportunity.

Whether you do first- or third-person, your narrative style will offer its own set of possibilities. Use them! Try new things and break new ground! Is that not what fiction is all about?