The Objective Narrator

The shades of the non-immersive tale

I thought, after writing of my shock at the confusion over the term ‘narrator,’ that I should carry on for a day, and examine what is all but lost today: the objective narrator.

This term is to be contrasted with the ‘subjective narrator,’ which encompasses the various POV styles used today: first person, third person, omniscient, third person serial. But the objective narrator is not simply a data recorder, but really is the narrator in his true self, the author who admits that the tale he is telling is being told by himself.

Thus we can see a range of possibilities for the objective narrator. At its most limited, and oddest, the term means that the author will not tell us in the audience what goes on within any of his characters’ hearts. He tells us what we would see, hear, smell, taste, or feel, if we were present on the scene he is describing; he shows us the characters’ actions, and from these we must infer what they are feeling.

But the broadest sense of the ‘objective narrator’ (and it is a sense that I am probably alone in using, alas) is the tale-teller as he once was of old.

Think of it this way. You go to a bar and you see an old pal you used to work with. You ask him about the old gang at the job, and he tells you tales about this one and that, the fool, the smart-guy, the mean boss, the top boss who doesn’t understand what really goes on, and so forth.

Now, your old friend doesn’t know what any one of those colleagues thinks. He does know them, however – he has worked alongside them and believes he knows how they would react in any given situation (or at least in situations analogous to the situations he has seen them involved in at work). So he might even tell you something of their feelings, without, however, identifying with them:

So Jones hears this, and right away he’s suspicious. But he’s scared of the boss just like he always was. So he has to think up some way to get around the situation and find out what the real facts are. So he comes up with a plan: he’ll go to the boss’s secretary and mention…

In just such a way were all the old tales told. This is usually called ‘omniscient,’ but in the case of the worker telling of Jones and his suspicions, the talesman doesn’t know for sure what Jones feels. At best, he spoke about the matter with Jones, and Jones told him he suspected something; an interview your old pal neglects to mention, for the sake of making the tale tell. And anyway, hearing Jones once say that he was suspicious about something, is not exactly the same as knowing what was going on in Jones’s head at the time the tale’s events unfolded.

In modern fiction, the talesman is god. He does in fact know – or can invent, and make it so – any thought or feeling in any of his cast of characters. If the author says it, it must be so; and we in the audience do not say, ‘the author didn’t understand his characters’ when their stated motives don’t make sense; we say, ‘the story was badly told, and the author created unbelievable characters.’

When the old talesmen told their tales, most, or all, of their characters were real, they had an existence, or had had an existence, as real as the talesmen themselves – or were believed to have had it, by both talesmen and audience alike. Therefore it was possible to tell a tale of Odysseus, and be reviled for lying about the King of Ithaka.

In much the same way gossip today is bandied about, and rumors of the famous are told, and though motives are ascribed to the great, the audience can disbelieve those motives, they can say, ‘That’s not the way I heard it’ or ‘I don’t believe it, you’ll have to show me some proof of that.’ But they don’t disbelieve the existence of the celebrity or political leader himself.

Tomorrow we will address the question of the more limited idea of the objective narrator. I used to write in that style, and I’ll try to recollect all the tricks I learned along the way. It was, as I recall, a fun way to tell a tale.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, August 26, 2008)