The Stupid Narrator

What happens if the character you choose to narrate your tale is dull, stupid, or offensive?

A Defective Character-Narrator

The Moonstone was written by Wilkie Collins and is a famous mystery. I’m reading the current text available online at Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org. Collins constructs his tale something like an epistolary novel: his conceit is that several of the characters have written down their recollections of the tale’s events. The first of these narrators is the head servant Gabriel Betteredge, a man Collins characterizes as a well-meaning, upright, fool.

Betteredge is defective as a narrator in the sense that he doesn’t tell us the whole story. He has not witnessed all the relevant events, and he doesn’t understand those events he has witnessed.

It makes for frustrating reading.

Sometimes frustration in the audience helps spice a tale. But sometimes it makes us want to leave the story behind. Collins had me reluctant to pick up the text again. Not good.

Collins tries to alleviate this tedium and frustration by poking fun at poor Mr Betteredge and his lack of insight into the hearts of others. To the extent that this humor amuses you, you will find the tedium and frustration lessened. I found it not very funny at all.

Who Tells the Tale

Whenever a talesman undertakes to present his tale as being told by somebody else, he complicates his tale in an unnecessary way. This is only worthwhile if this strategem adds enough entertainment to balance out the complication.

The complication doesn’t exist only in the tale, or in the way the talesman approaches his tale. It also exists in the minds of his audience. We among the audience must act as we do when watching a puppet show, and pretend to ignore the wires and strings.

The added entertainment of pretending the true narrator of the tale is not the teller of the tale, but a character within it, may lie in the character. An amusing character-narrator for example, or a tale whose entertainment value is added by the audience considering how the character-narrator is considering and reacting to the events. We will like this section of The Moonstone more if we find ourselves taken with Mr Betteredge, and are amused by his very befuddlement and lack of understanding of what the people around him are feeling and thinking (in order for this last to work, we must see through Mr Betteredge’s narrative and understand what he does not; this is tricky because to the extent that we see things clearly, we must consider Betteredge to be even more of a blockhead than he is). Or the added entertainment may lie in the structure of the tale. In the case of The Moonstone as a mystery, when Collins pretends he is only displaying what each character serially recollects, he creates a more realistic puzzle for us to solve. It is as if we are in the jury box, attending to the (un)sworn testimony of these witnesses each in turn.

Double Talesman

So what we have in the case of the character-narrator is a double talesman. There is Wilkie Collins who must set forth his tale as a series of smaller tales told in turn by each of these characters.

When we hear a tale, we find ourselves entertained either by the events in the tale, or by the mastery of the talesman telling it. The device of the character-narrator gives us a second talesman, who may or may not be a master of talesmanship.

Mr Gabriel Betteredge is a weak talesman, and my enjoyment of the tale in this section suffered as a result.

(First posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008)