The danger of a protagonist who goes unnamed
Recently, a friend of mine has been sending me some short story fragments of thinly veiled autobiographical sketches. In these fragments, he persists in refusing to name his central character.
This narrative strategy is an interesting, dangerous one. It becomes very interesting when identity is part of the subject matter or theme of the story. For example, Daphne du Maurier used this strategy to great effect in her novels Rebecca and The Scapegoat.In both these stories, the central character felt himself overshadowed by the spirit and personality of another character. By refusing to name the central character, du Maurier emphasizes this point: her central characters in these stories become ciphers, though in both cases the intention and effect is quite different.
I’m not sure what my friend’s intentions are in refusing to name his central character. But the strategy does get him into trouble sometimes, because the talesmanship it is at times unclear.
The first, and most basic difficulty this kind of strategy gets one into, is how to refer to the central character. ‘He’ or ‘she’ can refer to anyone in the story of that sex. When you have two or more men in a scene, and you say ‘he went to the bar,’ who is ‘he’? Is he him, or is he him? The pronoun ‘he’ refers to the last-named male character. But, unless the writer is very careful, he can trip himself up when he forgets who that last-named character is.
When the writer commits this mistake, it’s one of the most basic mistakes he talesmen can make. You never want to confuse your audience – not without a damn good reason. (And even a damn good reason is usually not enough.)
The name of a character is something like a tool in your work kit. If you don’t name a character, you are eschewing that tool. The result is something like a carpenter who decides ‘Today, I’m not going to use my hammer.’ Now, whenever the carpenter has a nail, what’s he going to use to drive it into the piece of wood? Should he pick up a ranch and try to use that? Or should he do without nails, and use a drill, a wood screw, and a screwdriver instead? All the time, that’s nice, most useful hammer is sitting in the work box grinning at him, taunting him, unavailable to him, all because he made the arbitrary decision that today he wasn’t going to use it.
The usual (and most-often used) strategy the talesmen use when they don’t want to name their central character is to tell the story using the first person point of view. That’s what Daphne du Maurier used in both Rebecca and The Scapegoat. The first-person pronoun is just as good as a name: each serves as a unique identifier for the character. But when the talesmen decides to change the first-person pronoun into the third-person, it’s not so simple as simply replacing every ‘I’ with a ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ or ‘her.’ Sometimes, the structure of the phrase has to be changed. Oftentimes, a couple of sentences have to be tinkered with, because the pronoun ‘I’ can’t refer back to the last-named character of the same sex, but can only refer to the narrator of the story. The pronoun ‘he’ on the other hand, does and will refer back to the last named male character.
In one of my stories, I tinkered with it for years, and at one point I decided that I wanted to tell the tale through the eyes of a minor character. So I went through the whole story and replace the third-person pronoun for this character with the first-person pronoun. This was very easy, and it never required me to change any other part of the sentence. In addition, the first-person pronoun has a strange and unsettling effect on the audience, rather like the direct address in the cinema or onstage which breaks the plane, the illusionary fourth wall of the theater. Suddenly the audience finds itself no longer safe as the voyeurs of the drama – now one of the actors looks at them, sees them, and addresses them directly. We are now part of the story, we are now, as it were, on the stage ourselves.
I rather liked the feeling that this change gave to the story, but after awhile I changed my mind again, and returned her to third-person. But now, changing back was not so easy. Now indeed, I had to look at the sentence structure and decide whether ‘she’ would work, and would make sense, and would be, above all, clear to my readers. I had to change a lot of sentences because of this.
My experience is probably the reason why I’m so sensitive to this issue, and why my friend’s slips stood out so strikingly to me.
Alfred Hitchcock was once quoted as saying, ‘The audience always has to know where they are in the story – even when they are wrong.’ This perfectly sums up the situation. The basic and first obligation of the talesmen is to be clear to the audience. Talesmanship is a subset of communication, and the rhetorical arts. The talesmen is always permitted to lie to us in the audience, and to deceive them – but even when he attempts this, he has to trick us in such a way that we think we know what’s going on, even though we have been deceived. Later on, when we find out how we’ve been tricked, we usually don’t like it, and only a great delight will make up for having been tricked and fooled.
So these are the lessons:
- Always name your central characters
- When you don’t name your central character, use the first-person point of view
Failing to follow these two simple rules will necessitate great care in telling your tale – maybe more care than it’s worth.
(Composed by dictation Tuesday 16 September 2008)
