In Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road the narrator, a 23-year-old college dropout, ex-Army, Vietnam vet, sounds suspiciously like the narrator in a lot of other first-person narratives authored by Heinlein. A lot like Heinlein himself.
This similarity sneaks into the story as it goes along. At the beginning, where the narrator, E. C. Gordon, talks about his history as a young man, family relationships, and education, the focus is so strongly on what makes Gordon different from Heinlein that it keeps Heinlein honest, if you will. We readers are never far from considering Gordon as a man born about 1940 who played high school football in the 1950s and served in Vietnam when Kennedy was President.
But then the story shifts, as Gordon is taken to another universe by a witch he calls Star, a beautiful nude blonde he meets on an islet in the Mediterranean. On alternate worlds Gordon acts as the Hero of Romance out of a hundred tales, and the focus now concerns Gordon’s reactions to these alien worlds and lifestyles as an American and Earthman. And here Gordon seems to be much better-read than the kid we learned about, and to express a more mature man’s views. In short, he starts to sound a lot more like Robert A. Heinlein.
One of the strengths of the first person narrative is its immersive quality, the ease by which we readers can identify with the narrator-protagonist, and live out his experiences vicariously. The narrator becomes an empty vessel or shell into which we project ourselves. We become the universal Hero walking Glory Road, aided by the sexy witch and an ugly, comedic sidekick. Or we become the private eye investigating murder in a corrupt Los Angeles, or the assassin of an unnamed government agency, or the second Mrs DeWinter.
For this hollow vessel to perform its function well, it has to be empty. It needs a surface only (preferably an attractive one of good physical fitness, handsome face and form, and a ready wit and intelligence) and its interior characteristics must be of aptitude and talent only, and nothing that would normally fall into the category of ‘character.’ This protagonist must be as much like ourselves as possible, except maybe slightly better – a little smarter, more educated, tougher, more intuitive, cleverer. Any aspects of his character that would shatter our identification must be avoided.
But even as the author hopes we readers will identify with his narrator-protagonist, he himself also wants to do so, and this is the snare for the author. When the author identifies too much himself with the narrator, he is apt to make the narrator likewise too much like himself. Then the narrator begins to have a specific character: the character of the author.
It is of course no fault that the narrator have a character, so long as this character is a proper literary character – in other words, so long as the character is true to himself. In this case, the character no longer serves as the hollow vessel through which we readers can vicariously live another more glamorous life, but acts instead as a traditional character out of a tale.
But when the author identifies with a narrator wholly unlike himself, and begins to assert over the narrator his own traits, we readers find the result discordant, jarring. Something isn’t right here. A 23-year old man doesn’t have the attitudes of a 50-year old man, and doesn’t remember the early 1940s, when he was a toddler, as though he were a grown and working man at the time.
This is something for anyone writing in the first person to remember. The narrating character can fall into two categories: either the empty vessel, without any meaningful inner life beyond that which the circumstances of the story provide; or the usual character who has come from a specific time and place, with a character of his own.
The only way around these choices is when the origins of the character closely mirror those of the author himself. So had Heinlein been writing aobut a 50-year old balding professional pulp writer who had dropped out of the military due to ill health, and the rest of whose background circumstances mirrored Heinlein’s own life, then he could have given us Heinlein the Unconquerable Hero as fully as he pleased.
(Composed 10 May 2010 on keyboard)
