PART THE SECOND, In Which We Do an Experiment and Gather Some Data
Go read Part One first, so we’re all on the same page as far as terminology goes.
[Jeopardy! music]
Done? Good. Onward.
Nowadays there are a plethora of first-person narrators who are the protagonists of their stories but aren’t intrusive. They are almost equivalent to 3rdP limited, transparent narrators.
The proof of this is how easily they can be converted from 1st person to 3rd person simply by swapping out pronouns. Herewith some examples of the openings of recent 1st-person-narrator novels, converted to 3rd person.
From Broken Blade, by Kelly McCullough:
Trouble wore a red dress. That was Aral’s first thought when the girl walked into the Gryphon’s Head. His second was that the dress didn’t fit as well as it should for a lady’s maid. It was cut for someone both bustier and broader across the hip than the current occupant. Not that she looked bad. The wrapping didn’t fit right, but the contents of the package more than made up for any lack in presentation.
The poor fit of the dress was a definite puzzler. Red was the coming fashion for servants in the great houses of Tien, and while your average duchess might not give a cracked cup whether her servants’ clothes fit comfortably, she cared enormously whether their looks reflected poorly on her. The fashion was too new for hand-me-downs, which meant the dress had to belong to someone other than the girl wearing it.
She turned Aral’s way and marched across the room without so much as a glance at the filthy straw covering the floor of the Gryphon’s common room. Jerik, the tavern’s owner, changed it out once a year whether it needed it or not, much to the annoyance of the rats and their more exotic magical playmates, the slinks and nipperkins. When Aral added her indifference to the awful things in the straw to the length of her stride and the set of her features, he had to revise that “girl” to woman though she was quite young.
“Are you the jack?” she asked when she reached his table. She leaned down toward him as she spoke, silhouetting herself against the only light in the room--a dim and badly scarred magelight chandelier.
“I’m a jack, and open to hire if you’re looking for one.” A jack of shadows, the underworld’s all-purpose freelancer--how very far he’d fallen from the old days.
“I was told to look for Aral...”
She drew the word out almost into a question, as if hoping he might supply something more than his first name. It was a tactic he recognized from long, personal use and one he didn’t much like having turned back on him. But if he wanted to keep paying his bar tab, he needed to work, so he nodded.
Nearly 400 words into the book, and all I changed was pronouns and occasionally using the POV character’s name in place of a pronoun. This is a close narrative focus with an invisible narrator.
(Lois McMaster Bujold uses close narrative focus with an invisible narrator in all her novels, so that’s certainly no opprobrium.)
Two paragraphs later, we get into a bit of action that’s more specific to the worldbuilding and the character, and still it works just fine whether it’s narrated in 1st or 3rd:
Out of the corner of his eye, Aral saw his shadow shifting slowly leftward as if seeking a better view of the young woman. Aral leaned that way as well, to cover the shadow’s movements, and accidentally elbowed his whiskey bottle off the table. It thudded into the straw but didn’t break. Not that it mattered. He’d finished the last of the contents twenty minutes ago. Which, in all honesty, might have had something to do with his knocking it over.
“Hang on a tick,” he said, and bent to pick the bottle out of the moldering straw.
He took the opportunity offered by the cover of the table to make a sharp “no” signal to Triss with his left hand. He couldn’t afford to let anyone notice his shadow moving of its own accord, not with the price on their heads--prices, really, as there was more than one interested party. And even this darkest corner of a seedy tavern had light enough for a trained eye to make a potentially fatal connection.
He swore silently at his shadow familiar while he returned the bottle to the table. Cut it the hell out, Triss! That was just frustration. If he didn’t say it out loud, Triss couldn’t hear him, and if Aral did, he might just as well cut his own throat and get it over with. The Shade did stop moving, but whether that was because of Aral’s hand signal or simply because he’d gotten an adequate eyeful, Aral didn’t know.
Very tight 3rdP, that possibly starts to get a little clunky as multiple characters of the same gender (Aral and Triss) both are referenced in a sentence that also does a minor worldbuild infodump (the bit about how Aral and Triss have to speak aloud to communicate). But simply swapping out pronouns does the trick.
Here, have some more examples of this phenomenon from other books:
From Incarnate by Jodi Meadows:
She wasn’t reborn.
She was five when she first realized how different that made her. It was the spring equinox in the Year of Souls: Soul Night, when others traded stories about things they’d done three lifetimes ago. Ten lives. Twenty. Battles against dragons, developing the first laser pistol, and Cris’s four-life quest to grow a perfect blue rose, only for everyone to declare it was purple.
No one bothered talking to her, so she’d never said a word--not ever--but she knew how to listen. They’d all lived before, had memories to share, had lives to look forward to. They danced around the trees and fire, drank until they fell over laughing, and when the time came to sing gratitude for immortality, a few glanced at her , and the clearing was so eerie quiet you could hear the waterfall crashing on rocks a league south.
Li took her home and the next day Ana collected all the words she knew and made a sentence. Everyone else remembered a hundred lifetimes before this one. She had to know why she couldn’t.
“Who am I?” Her first spoken words.
“No one,” Li said. “Nosoul.”
***
Ana was leaving.
It was her eighteenth birthday, only a few weeks after the turning of the year. Li said, “Safe journey, Ana,” but her expression was stony, and Ana doubted she meant it with any sincerity.
The Year of the Drought had been the worst of her life, filled with accumulated anger and resentment. The Year of Hunger hadn’t started much better, but now it was her birthday and she had a backpack filled with food and supplies, and a mission to find out who she was, why she existed. The chance to escape her mother’s hostile glares was a happy benefit.
From Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison:
Rachel stood in the the shadows of a deserted shop front across from The Blood and Brew Pub, trying not to be obvious as she tugged her black leather pants back up where they belonged. This is pathetic, she thought, eyeing the rain-emptied street. She was way too good for this.
Apprehending unlicensed and black-art witches was her usual line of work, as it took a witch to catch a witch. But the streets were quieter than usual this week. Everyone who could make it was at the West Coast for the yearly witches’ convention, leaving Rachel with this gem of a run. A simple snag and drag. It was just the luck of the Turn that had put her here in the dark and rain.
“Who am I kidding?” she whispered, pulling the strap of her bag farther up her shoulder. She hadn’t been sent to tag a witch in a month: unlicensed, white, dark, or otherwise. Bringing the mayor’s son in for Wereing outside of a full moon probably hadn’t been the best idea.
A sleek car turned the corner, looking black in the buzz of the mercury street lamp. This was its third time around the block. A grimace tightened Rachel’s face as it approached, slowing. “Damn it,” she whispered. “I need a darker door front.”
“He thinks you’re a hooker, Rachel,” her backup snickered into her ear. “I told you the red halter was slutty.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you smell like a drunk bat, Jenks?” she muttered, her lips barely moving. Backup was unsettlingly close tonight, having perched himself on Rachel’s earring. Big dangling thing--the earring, not the pixy. She’d found Jenks to be a pretentious snot with a bad attitude and a temper to match. But he knew what side of the garden his nectar came from. And apparently pixies were the best they’d let Rachel take out since the frog incident. She would have sworn fairies were too big to fit into a frog’s mouth.
From The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson:
Note: I also adjusted verbs to make them agree with a 3rd person pronoun rather than 1st in present tense. Oh, English, you are wonderful.
Prayer candles flicker in her bedroom. The Scriptura Sancta lies discarded, pages crumpled, on her bed. Bruises mark her knees from kneeling on the tiles, and the Godstone in her navel throbs. Elisa has been praying--no, begging--that King Alejandro de Vega, her future husband, will be ugly and old and fat.
Today is the day of her wedding. It is also her sixteenth birthday.
She usually avoids mirrors, but the day is momentous enough that she risks a look. She can’t see very well; the lead glass ripples, her head aches, and she is dizzy from hunger. But even blurred, the wedding terno is beautiful, made of silk like water with tiny glass beads that shimmer when she moves. Embroidered roses circle the hem and the flared cuffs of her sleeves. It’s a masterpiece, given its rushed stitching.
But she knows the terno’s beauty will be much diminished when buttoned.
She sighs and motions for help. Nurse Ximena and Lady Aneaxi creep toward her, armed with button hooks and apologetic smiles.
“Take a deep breath, my sky,” Ximena instructs. “Now let it out. All of it, love.”
Elisa pushes air from her lungs, pushes and pushes until her head swims. The ladies jerk and loop with their flashing hooks; the gown tightens. The bodice in the mirror puckers. It digs into her skin just above her hips. A jagged pain shoots up her side, like the stitch she gets walking up the stairs.
Nary a bobble. Even with three female characters in the same scene, simply swapping pronouns works perfectly. Very clean, Bujoldian, tight POV.
Last example, from Cold Magic, by Kate Elliott:
The history of the world begins in ice, and it will end in ice.
Or at least, that’s how the dawn chill felt in the bedchamber as Cat struggled out from beneath the cozy feather comforter under which she and her cousin slept. Cat winced as she set her feet on the brutally cold wood floor. Any warmth from last evening’s fire was long gone. At this early hour, Cook would just be getting the kitchen’s stove going again, two floors below. But last night Cat had slipped a book out of her uncle’s parlor and brought it to read in her bedchamber by candlelight, even though she and Bee were expressly forbidden from doing so. He had even made them sign a little contract stating that they had permission to read Cat’s father’s journals and the other books in the parlor as long as they stayed in the parlor and did not waste expensive candlelight to do so. She had to put the book back before he noticed it was gone, or the cold would be the least of her troubles.
After all the years sharing a bed with her cousin Beatrice, she knew Bee was such as heavy sleeper that Cat could have jumped up and down on the bed without waking her. She had tried it more than once. So she left her cousin behind and picked out suitable clothing from the wardrobe: fresh drawers, two layers of stockings, and a knee-length chemise over which she bound a fitted wool bodice. She fumblingly laced on two petticoats and a cutaway overskirt, blowing on her fingertips to warm them, and over it buttoned a tight-fitting, hip-length jacket cut in last year’s fashionable style.
With her walking boots and the purloined book in hand, Cat cracked the door and ventured out onto the second-floor landing to listen. No noise came from her aunt and uncle’s chamber, and the little girls, in the nursery on the third floor above, were almost certainly still asleep. But the governess who slept upstairs with them would be rousing soon, and Cat’s uncle and his factotum were usually up before dawn. They were the ones she absolutely had to avoid.
She crept down to the first-floor landing and paused there, peering over the railing to survey the empty foyer on the ground floor below. Next to her, a rack of swords, the badge of the Hassi Barahal family tradition, lined the wall. Alongside the rack stood their house mirror, in whose reflection Cat could see both herself and the threads of magic knit through the house. Uncle and Aunt were important people in their own way. As local representatives of the far-flung Hassi Barahal clan, they discreetly bought and sold information, and in return might receive such luxuries as a cawl--a protective spell bound over the house by a drua--or door and window locks sealed by a blacksmith to keep out unwanted visitors.
Again, not much changes. Pronouns, and a few spots where the discussion of two characters with the same gender tangles up the antecedents and forces the use of names instead of pronouns.
Let me reiterate: None of these books suffers for being narrated in first person. There isn’t any moral or artistic failing if a writer chooses 1P or 3P.
They do have different narrative voices. Even in 3P, each of these books sounds different. They don’t have the same sentence structure nor the same pattern of paragraph lengths, and the POV focuses on things that character would focus on.
But the narrator is invisible. We are no closer to the character’s head in 1P or 3P.
Now, lest you think this is true of all 1st-person narration, here are some examples where simply swapping pronouns doesn’t suffice:
From The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins:
When Katniss wakes up, the other side of the bed is cold. Her fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. Prim must have had bad dreams and climbed in with their mother. Of course she did. This is the day of the reaping.
She props herself up on one elbow. There’s enough light in the bedroom to see them. Her little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in her mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together. In sleep, her mother looks younger, still worn but not so beaten-down. Prim’s face is as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely as the primrose for which she was named. Her mother was very beautiful once, too. Or so they tell her.
Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Mashed-in nose, half of one ear missing, eyes the color of rotting squash. Prim named him Buttercup, insisting that his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower. He hates Katniss. Or at least distrusts her. Even though it was years ago, she thinks he still remembers how she tried to drown him in a bucket when Prim brought him home. Scrawny kitten, belly swollen with worms, crawling with fleas. The last thing she needed was another mouth to feed. But Prim begged so hard, cried even, Katniss had to let him stay. It turned out okay. Her mother got rid of the vermin and he’s a born mouser. Even catches the occasional rat. Sometimes, when Katniss cleans a kill, she feeds Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at her.
Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest they will ever come to love.
Some of the pronoun issues come from having three female characters simultaneously under discussion. But note also how in paragraph 2 it’s “her mother” because in the original it’s “my mother.” Not “their/our mother.” This is a subtle thing, but it falls apart with direct translation into 3rd person.
Katniss doesn’t speak of the senior Everdeen as mother to both her and Prim. That Katniss sees herself as Prim’s primary caretaker is crucial to her character; literally everything Katniss does is caused by this dynamic. She volunteers for Prim at the reaping, and she fights extra hard to win because she promised Prim she would.
The other place the translation of POV doesn’t work easily is in discussion of Buttercup. Told in 3rd person, that paragraph makes Katniss sound cruel. Told in 1st person, it makes her sound hard and tough-minded, ruthlessly practical, but not sadistic. It is an example where being directly in the character’s head affects how the reader interprets the statements.
But an even better example is this:
From Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear:
You ain’t gonna like what she has to tell you, but she’s gonna tell you anyway. See, her name is Karen Memery, like “memory” only spelt with an e, and she’s one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. “Hôtel” has a little hat over the o like that. It’s French, so Beatrice tells her.
Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So she guesses that makes her a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. Karen pays her sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s got a foot treadle, if you take her meaning.
Only two paragraphs in and we see a simple pronoun-swap 3rd person translation is impossible. Karen’s narrative voice is absolutely intrusive, talking directly to an audience. “...she’s gonna tell you anyway”, “or so Beatrice tells her”, and “if you take her meaning” make no damn sense at all from a 3rd person narrator. They are self-referencing. A 3rd person narrator cannot self-reference as the POV character.
This isn’t just a narrative voice tailored to match the POV character. This is Karen’s voice. She speaks with asides and digressions and phrases that a 3rd person, transparent narrator never could.
One more.
From Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie:
(Skipping the first two paragraphs because they translate just fine to 3rd POV. But then...)
Sometimes she doesn’t know why she does the things she does. Even after all this time it’s still a new thing for her not to know, not to have orders to follow from one moment to the next. So she can’t explain to you why she stopped and with one foot lifted the naked shoulder so she could see the person’s face.
Frozen, bruised, and bloody as the person was, Breq knew her. Her name was Seivarden Vendaai, and a long time ago she had been one of Breq’s officers, a young lieutenant, eventually promoted to her own command, another ship. Breq had thought her a thousand years dead, but she was, undeniably, here. Breq crouched down and felt for a pulse, for the faintest stir of breath.
Still alive.
Seivarden Vendaai was no concern of Breq’s anymore, wasn’t her responsibility. And she had never been one of Breq’s favorite officers. Breq had obeyed her orders, of course, and she had never abused any ancillaries, never harmed any of Breq’s segments (as the occasional officer did). Breq had no reason to think badly of her. On the contrary, her manners were those of an educated, well-bred person of good family. Not toward Breq, of course--she wasn’t a person, she was a piece of equipment, a part of the ship. But Breq had never particularly cared for Seivarden.
“So she can’t explain to you” is similar to the thing that happens in Karen Memory: the narrator is intrusive, speaking directly to the reader. The pronouns don’t swap cleanly to 3rdP.
But even if you deleted any such structure, you still have two major problems. First, the pronoun thing is impossible. Because the Radchaai language only uses she/her pronouns, the only way to distinguish between them is to use character names a lot. By narrating in 1stP, some of this is avoided, but in 3rdP a lot of these sentences would need reworking.
And that leads to the other problem, which is that the situation Breq is talking about in that last paragraph technically didn’t happen to Breq. Everywhere I had to put “Breq,” the more correct name would have been “Justice of Toren.” Breq never had any segments; Justice of Toren did. “Breq” is just an alias for the individual left after the rest of the multipart AI ship was destroyed. A thousand years ago when Seivarden was an officer, “Breq” didn’t exist as an entity.
Both of these concepts--the multipart AI and the linguistic twist on pronouns--are essential to the book. Without those two things, the book cannot exist. It could literally not be this book. One could probably create a 3rd person narrative structure that could tell the same plot (though I don’t think it could be anywhere near as effective). But you can’t just flop Breq’s 1st person narrative to 3rd person and have it work. It falls completely apart.
It’s not that the five books I gave as examples of “invisible” narrators don’t have patches where the swap wouldn’t work. They do. They all have some intrusive bits.
But not so many, nor so distinctively, nor as essential as in Hunger Games, Karen Memory, or Ancillary Justice.
My three counterexamples start with the essential quality right on the first page. The structure and focus of the books also makes this arrangement essential to the worldbuilding, character, and/or story. (I’ll detail these qualities more thoroughly in part four of this blog series.)
Whereas the other five examples, while they might have a few sections further in that would need to be rewritten rather than just pronoun-swapped, they don’t start in that space, and don’t dwell in it for more than a page or two at a time when it does happen. The books don’t rely on the 1st person narration to make them what they are.
And I can’t help but think that in some cases, some books might benefit from avoiding 1stP and using a Bujoldian tight 3rdP instead.
I will discuss this concept more in the next post.