Tag: character development

Adam Johnson’s Use of the Unreliable Narrator

Adam Johnson’s masterful writing in his latest collection of stories reveal some very interesting twists. One in particular, “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” uses the unreliable narrator as a way of exhibiting a psycho-social disconnect between generations in East Germany.

I think it’s interesting how we find great storytellers. In the fall of 2016, I went back to Louisville for another residency with my MFA program, only I was no longer a student. As a residency assistant, I didn’t think to ask ahead of time what the book in common was (program required reading). I found out when I arrived that it was Adam Johnson’s Orphan Master’s Son, a Pulitzer winner in 2013. I had never heard of him, but that’s not a surprise. There are so many great authors out there that I am still trying to read, popular or not. During this residency, Mr. Johnson spoke to a packed crowd of literati from several writing programs. It took place in a converted, old warehouse, more cave-like with few windows and blacked out doors, located west of downtown near the Ohio River. Very edgy place for an author’s reading, which usually take place in book stores, auditoriums and galleries. He stood in the middle of a stage overlooking rows of listeners and read “Nirvana” from start to finish, then answered several poignant questions from the crowd about writing and theory. I was awestruck by his intellect and approachable demeanor.

After the reading, I purchased his latest book, a collection of short stories called Fortune Smiles, containing the story he had read to us and five others. I also borrowed “Orphan Master’s Son” from a friend, consequently reading it before I started on the collection. Brilliant in so many ways, I was hooked. It’s not an easy read. Nor are many of the choices on the Pulitzer list. But, it does help to read the transcripts from interviews and essays littered about on the internet to get a better understanding of the complexity and where the mind of the author wants to take you. Fortune Smiles is much easier to wrap your head around, wonderfully written with poignant humor and socially significant themes.

While reading “Nirvana” I was taken back to his excellent reading. As fun to hear as much as it was read, Johnson is deft with creating interesting juxtapositions of character, objects and situation. When I made it to “George Orwell was a Friend of Mine,” I had to think about the title, having read several of Orwell’s works, and wonder about the connection to this story. The story had me right away. Johnson’s ability to pull the reader into his work was mesmerizing. Best of all, I saw the intention of an unreliable narrator building as each page passed.

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The story comes to us through the narrator, a former prison warden during the communist controlled era in East Germany. The prison was used by the secret police to interrogate political dissidents and torture them. Now retired and the prison an atrocity museum, the warden simply lives in the shadow of where he used to work. The story really is simple, at first, because the warden tells us in a matter-of-fact way what he does, and why he does it. He walks his dog. He sees some old coworkers and has watched the changes taking place after the fall of the Soviet Union. All of it seems so perfunctory for Hans, the Warden. But, there’s a slow buildup of the psychological structure to this man.

The unreliable narrator’s perception of events are often askew, not aligned with current mores. The reader, however, discerns between what is right and how messed up the narrator is, because they are given textual clues. The first of many alarming clues begins when Hans carries his wife to bed, after she passed out from having had too much to drink. “That’s why, when her faint snoring came, I’d open her robe and slowly, tenderly begin making love to her.” (145). That’s not love. That’s rape. His sense of morality is obviously messed up. Through this technique, the reader can be drawn into the story even more, because they have invested their opinion and beliefs.

Another scene early in the story places Hans in direct confrontation with a group of people, comprised mostly teens and their tour guide from the atrocities museum, venerating a significant commemoration, a tree for a famous GDR playwright. Hans showed no regard for the memorial and let his dog to shit at the base of the tree while the guide gave a description of the memorial. He was never sympathetic toward the playwright. And, he didn’t like what the guide said, so he started to interject with his own opinion of the man; “Herr Wexler was a pervert and a drug addict who embezzled money…” The tour guide asks, “If Klaus Wexler’s crime was embezzlement, why did he not go through the criminal courts? Why did the Stasi bring him here, to a secret interrogation prison?” The scene continues with Hans explaining in great detail the reasons for the prison, the solitary confinement, and torture chambers, the reason to force confessions out of political dissidents for the good of the state. He speaks with pride in the work the Stasi did, because they were protecting the state.

It’s from these early scenes that we see Hans and his misguided beliefs—his complete ignorance of the horrific events that occurred underneath his nose—his inability to understand the machine he was a part of. It only gets better, but I won’t spoil it for you. The story progresses with more about Hans’ twisted, almost brainwashed view of the world, still holding onto this belief to the very end. He gives us the details to why he thought that way, but never comes to realize, even at the very end, that it was wrong. In a way, if he had confessed during his own torture, he would have been guilty of a crime, but he never does confess and we are left to wonder what will happen as the water chamber continues to fill up.

This type of character, as a narrator, allows us to think about how authority figures can be myopic and dangerous. Plus, we gain insight into ourselves through how we react to each step in the story. What does it say about the reader when they fail to react to criminal events? Using the unreliable narrator is an excellent tool for all writers if they want to capture the reader’s emotional investment, but to get there the writer needs to think like someone who is diametrically opposed to their own moral fiber, which is not easy to do.

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Attention Grammar Police! Just Relax

Great writing bends the rules and grammar has a lot of rules to bend.

After finishing Bob Shacochis’ The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, I read some online reviews at Goodreads and in blogs, both personal and professional. I was surprised by the comments made by very intelligent and persuasive writers and critics. Many of them were dogmatic about the need for punctuation, as if their mental faculties could not reach beyond the omission of quotation marks and commas. Some remarks were scathing enough to suggest that the author needed “A real editor,” because the “syntax felt disjointed at times,” and “missing commas and containing long, descriptive sentences.” Regardless of these critics, this book was nominated for a Pulitzer. Yet, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men did not receive the same demerits from its audience (and was never nominated for a prize, gaining wide-spread notoriety only through film). Sure, there were many who sarcastically mimicked his southwestern dialog, but did little to comment on his use of syntax and punctuation, which resemble in many ways those of Shacochis. I wonder if these people felt the same way after reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Pinball 16x9 1200Several arguments can spring from this interesting problem, such as the Goodreads community and the credibility in their comments. Also, the popularity of a writer seems to lessen the barrage of criticism. What really is at stake here are the stylistic concerns for two incredibly talented writers of our time. The artists chose to omit much of the typical punctuation, handling punctuation as a painter deals with color selections and placement, in order to convey two very different stories.

Our eyes rise and fall on the written page, following the channel markers provided by commas and quotation marks. These are some of the most common marks in a book. Of course, the period plays a major part, as does a hyphen and the dreaded semicolon; however, between the first letter of a sentence and the period, commas are frequent, as well as quotation marks.

Both Shacochis and McCarthy forgo the open and closed quotation marks in all of their dialog. Yes, this can be confusing at first, like adjusting your eyes in after the light has been turned on in a dark room. The blending of narration and dialog made my thoughts jump around, never stalling, trying to figure out the speakers. If it frustrates you, then you can skim beyond and hopefully retain some of the meaning of what was said. Or, you can go back and learn the voice of the speaking character and know who is talking without the use of quotation marks. Sure, it takes a bit of work, but so does looking at an amazing painting (there are so many, just think of one), in order to analyze the depth of intention each brush stroke presents. Shacochis’ characters’ voices present themselves brilliantly, with singularity, from a master of the craft. Eventually, I noticed that the omission of quotation marks sped up my progress through the novel, which is a very nice thing considering Shacochis’ work exceeds 750 pages, travels two continents, and has all the trappings of an international spy thriller.

McCarthy’s work is more terse, masculine, and brief, reflecting the simplicity and emptiness of the landscape. Whether it’s third person or first person narration, the character’s voice is clearly heard and understood. The reader understands the frustration of Sherriff Ed Tom. Moreover, the reader feels the tension of what is not said. Hitchcockian tension from the omitted. Following Chigurh’s almost quixotic, definitely crazy, dialog, the rapidity of exchanges heightens the need to slow down and read them closely. Moments that take place, such as the coin toss to decide a potential victims fate exemplify the cold, dark reality of irrational violence, a violence without empathy, the sociopath on display.

StanFlowers 5x7 400ding firm with grammarians is important, and many omitted marks can confuse a reader. But, think of these artists like they are Pizzaro or Monet, trailblazers into new dimensions of writing theory, like the impressionists, who “Impressionism was a style of representational art that did not necessarily rely on realistic depictions. Scientific thought at the time was beginning to recognize that what the eye perceived and what the brain understood were two different things.”* These books are a form of impressionism. They provoke a sense of feeling. Are Chigurh or Jackie Scott real? Possible, even probable, but not real. They are representational of evil, chaos, fate, and the unknown. All are powers beyond anyone’s reckoning, yet we strive to try and control them as best we can.

If you’ve already taken up the banner of contemporary techniques in fiction, then this essay has very little to do for you, other than possibly introducing something partially enlightening. But this essay is more for those who would believe that sentences need to be tight, always, and precise, forgetting the nuance of a narrator’s voice, their cadence toward highlights in a story, sometimes building the journey that leads to their feeling excitement or dismay. It’s all there for the reader to feel. And, yes, omission of punctuation does this.

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The Connection Between Sense of Place and Character Development In Russel Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter”

Rachel Harper, one of my mentors at Spalding University, suggested that I read Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter to understand alternating narrators and character development. I had been struggling to connect sense of place with my characters and avoid the pitfalls of being sentimental or a bombastic orator. This is something I feel necessary in writing, particularly with stories about society’s structures and awareness.

Banks’ uses four narrators, four very different perspectives, to shape the reader’s understanding of tragedy, loss, and hope. Each narrator is a character in the story living in the village of Sam Dent. They depict life before and after a bus accident in the village of Sam Dent, where over twenty children die in a terrible school bus accident. All of it coalesces into a greater understanding of small-town American life. Many small towns in America have experienced the loss of many children. They represent the future and people left behind to grieve.

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Delores Driscoll, the school bus driver and life-long resident of Sam Dent, takes the reader on a ride with her driving the children to the school. Her narration feels like she is reliving this memory, over and over again. She is going over every detail to try and make sense of that unfortunate day. Her detailed account delivers a sense of place with honesty through personal opinions of each child lost in the crash, elaborating on their family and home life, “Poverty and house trailers are not uncommon in Sam Dent” (Banks 9). Much like a tour guide, her nearly daily contact with the children of Sam Dent outside of their homes gives Delores direct insight into their personal lives and insight into herself.

Delores’ personal knowledge of Sam Dent comes from growing up on a dairy farm just outside of town on one of the original homesteads. Her knowledge of the people and surrounding community represents a social history of the village and rural life in the mountains. Along her bus route on Bartlett Hill, she has “three stops in short order” (Banks 15), where the families that live there have built on “lots out of a tract of land that had once belonged to my father and grandfather” (Banks 15). She sold them the land, and watched them build their homes “piecemeal”, but never regretted it:

I’d rather watch the little tatty Capes and ranches of local folks, people I’ve known since they were children themselves, going up on that land than the high-tech summer houses and A-frame ski lodges…built by rich yuppies from New York City who don’t give a damn for this town or the people in it. (Banks 15)

The community is her identity. Delores lets the reader know how Sam Dent is different than Lake Placid and other towns that tourist are attracted to. Tourists can never understand her point-of-view, because “Sam Dent is one of those towns that’s on the way to somewhere else, and when people get this far (from New York City), they usually keep going” (Banks 21).

Billy Ansel’s story follows Delores’. He has the only eyewitness account of the bus accident, because he was following the bus and saw it veer off the highway into a frozen lake. His two children died in that accident. Much of his narrative depicts his character through his view of Sam Dent. He understands how life in Sam Dent follows a certain natural order, unfettered by the fast pace and modern conveniences of big city life that seem unnatural, or outside the laws of nature. He believes in cause and effect, as each generation passes, another one comes up to replace them. For Billy the accident is, “so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it. It’s almost beyond belief or comprehension that the children should die before the adults” (Banks 78). One of the most profound statements about a parent losing a child.

Billy’s sense of place continues to try and make sense of tragedy. “A town that loses its children loses its meaning” (Banks 78). The natural balance of life has been upset by the accident, and the future of Sam Dent is in jeopardy. This mirrors Delores’ sentiments earlier. The loss of a child is personally devastating, as well as catastrophic for a town, because without the children of a small town, no one will want to settle there and be a part of the community. We understand Billy’s trauma and the extent to which it reaches.

The next narrator is Mitchell Stephens, a big-shot lawyer from New York City. He has an outsider’s view of Sam Dent. This lawyer is familiar with small towns, due to the many lawsuits he pursues in rural communities. He believes his part in the tragedy is to redeem the people’s hope after such horrific circumstances. But, the reader knows he is there only to get a big payout from these children’s death.

Many of Mitchell’s ideas about Sam Dent are presented in the physical description of the upstate region, “It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall” (Banks 93). He depicts a world dominated by massive trees, and a harsh inescapable weather, “It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, shut up pal, I’m in charge here” (Banks 93). His narration has the advantage of contrasting rural life with big city life; Sam Dent is entirely populated by trees with a few people and businesses living among them, and the only sound is from the constant howling of the wind through the empty boughs, not the jackhammers or traffic he is more accustomed, too.

His outsider’s view of Sam Dent is full of ignorance through statements such as, “Most of the people who live there year round are scattered in little villages in the valleys, living on food stamps and collecting unemployment, huddling close to their fires and waiting out the winter” (Banks 94). He compares the poor of New York City as living on reservations, “Not like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where you feel that the poor are imprisoned… life long prisoners of the rich, who live and work in the high-rises outside” (Banks 95). Then, he portrays the poor of Sam Dent as ostracized, “Made to forage in the woods for their sustenance and shelter, grubbing nuts and berries” (Banks 95), living in the ancient fictitious world of Ultima Thule, a northern land that is beyond the civilized world. For Mitchell, the people of Sam Dent are to be pitied, and stirred to anger so that they can enact some form of revenge, which is exactly the opposite belief of Billy and Delores, who want to grieve and move on.

The fourth narrator is Nichole Burnell, a survivor of the crash and wheelchair bound for the rest of her life due to the injuries sustained in the crash. Her view of home life in Sam Dent gives the reader a better view of everyday life: her relationships with her parents and brothers and sister, and the babysitting of other kids in town, as well as her friends and boyfriend. Before the crash she was a cheerleader, academically gifted, and had a bright future for herself, yet plagued with the dark secret of incest. Aspects of her daily life, how she eats, where she goes to the bathroom, how she interacts with others, change dramatically after the accident. She reflects upon these changes within her life, looking at how her life was and how her life will be, which is unusual for a healthy teenager.

Nichole’s character comes through her sense of place. She shows it best when she writes about the founder of the village, Sam Dent. The paper is so well done, she is asked to use it for a salutatorian speech, only if she “Cut out all the bad things he (Sam Dent) had done, like cheating the Indians out of their land and buying his way out of the Civil War things that lots of people did in those days but that were just as bad then as they would be now” (Banks 188). There are wide swaths of history, positive and enlightening, that she keeps from the reader, and the brief historical account of the town the reader encounters contains negative aspects of Sam Dent. She has the intellect to comment on the teachers wanting her to edit the paper, and she feels these details need to remain, because without them the town will forget its past.

Russell Banks use of four very different narrators is a masterful way to develop his characters. Each narrator depicts a unique perspective of Sam Dent, and gives the reader a more complete sense of place. From the grand physical landscape, to the social connections of the people, Sam Dent becomes a character—more than a dot on a map. We embrace these characters through their loss and grief, and sense of place adds a critical layer of depth to their development.

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