Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

The Narrator’s Likeability

The Narrator’s Likeability Think about your own experience of meeting someone for the first time: You usually have a gut response, sometimes before the person speaks. And once the person speaks, you unconsciously move forward or take a step back because you’re forming lightning fast opinions and judgments . By stepping in, you’re inviting this person into your personal space, your world; by stepping back, you’re retreating or putting up a barrier between you and this stranger. A reader’s feelings toward a narrator are similarly complex and mysterious . (Remember: the narrator is the character whose perspective we’re in. In a story or novel that remains in one character’s perspective throughout, the narrator is usually, although not always, the main character. Therefore , much of what I have to say about a narrator holds true as well for the main character.) Perhaps more than any other element of fiction, the narrator elicits strong subjective reactions. In fact, the reader may read a single page—sometimes as little as the opening paragraph—and decide right then and there that she doesn’t like the narrator and won’t read any more of it. The reader may find the narrator silly, depressing, annoying, pathetic, or dull. If reading a novel or story is a journey, the reader may jump ship shortly after it leaves port and swim back to shore rather than spend the next however-many-days with someone she deems silly, depressing , annoying, etc. To complicate matters, men and women sometimes respond differently to main characters. In my Humor in American Literature course, several men found the female protagonists of Lorrie Moore’s stories to be “whiny.” Therefore, they didn’t like the stories. The women, however, could “relate” to the protagonists (relate is a word that comes up a lot during discussions the narrator’s likeability 47 of main characters) and, therefore, championed the stories. Similarly, I’ve sat in classes where women have reacted negatively to Ernest Hemingway’s main characters, calling them “sentimental,” “macho,” “jerks.” Conversely, male writers often cite Ernest Hemingway as one of their strongest influences . (Of course, I know men who like Lorrie Moore and women who like Ernest Hemingway, but the issue of a reader’s gender can’t be easily dismissed. There’s a reason why, to use extreme examples, readers of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler are predominantly male while readers of socalled chick lit are predominantly female.) Reactions to narrators are often personal. You pick up a book, and if the main character reminds you of someone you know and don’t like, you’ll throw the book down. Or you’ll keep reading but find yourself yelling at the narrator: “Stupid! You fool!” Based on my own experience as a writer, I can say with confidence that no writer can please everyone. It’s impossible. I’ll read reviews of my work and not even recognize the character they’re describing. This holds true for both positive and negative reactions to characters. It may be that the critics are recognizing in one of my characters an aspect of someone they know. It may be that they see aspects of themselves. If readers know something about me and my background, they’ll sometimes assume I’m writing about myself even when I’m not. In each instance, the reader is superimposing something over the character that simply isn’t there. Sometimes it’s something negative, but sometimes it’s something positive, and it’s this positive superimposition that keeps the reader engaged. But how do you, as a writer, control that? You can’t. I’ve seen a few of my narrators described as losers, narrators whom I thought were honorable but simply dealt a bad hand in life. For all I know, “loser” is the way readers who haven’t had bad luck in their own lives view those who can’t seem to get things to go their way. As a writer, you put your work out into the world, and then the readers start heaping their own baggage and preconceived notions onto the work, and it’s usually the narrator who ends up carrying the brunt of that weight. Unless your work is being read by an audience of robots, it’s futile to think you can get everyone to see the narrator precisely as you see him or her. 48...