Narrative Voice

It’s a curious thing that often when we begin to describe or retell a story we begin describing not the story but our own creation that may or may not have analogs to the story that we are intending to retell. This is an issue for students, novelists, pastors, historians, and anyone holding a casual conversation on the street corner. It’s likely a helpful practice then to be aware of what we are doing when we retell a story.

There are some stories reported by a named or anonymous persona. This persona may be loquacious or laconic. The common denominator is the persona’s conspicuous presence in the telling of the story. Though the persona may not be directly involved in the story, the persona is involved in so far as the persona engages on occasion with the reader and the characters’ thoughts and actions. The persona in a sense commentates on the story while telling the story. Perhaps, at times, the persona budges into the front and center of the stage so that the people, places, and events of the story are a backdrop to the persona’s commentating. The story may then be pages and pages of commentary and less actual action by the given people in the story. This sort of narrative voice is often simplistically referred to as telling.

In contrast, there may not be a persona telling the story. You may begin reading or for that matter listening without any inclination that there is someone telling the story other than the fact that portions of narrative are included and excluded in the telling of the story. The people, places, and events are front and center throughout the entirety of the story. There is not a persona commentating on the story’s happenings. There are merely people doing and saying things. This sort of narrative voice may be referred to as showing (similar to telling, this form of narrative may take on numerous forms such as implied third person, first person reflective, first person stream of consciousness, etc, so there is not one single form of showing).

However, the distinction between telling and showing is naïve, for never is one form present and the other form absent. The difference then is that one form may be more present than the other. There are innumerable combinations. Gogol and Dickens come to mind as two novelists who do commentate but restrainedly, while there are some earlier novelists who find themselves most interesting and thus chat more than their characters. This lies in stark contrast with Sartre’s protagonist in Nausea. Antoine Roquentin journals about the world around him and within him. Sartre or Sartre’s possible persona is not commentating on Antoine. The reader encounters Antoine filtered only by the implied narration of the narrator, implied because some happenings are included while others are excluded, and even then it would seem that Antoine is his own narrator. Other examples of this sort of extreme showing are As I Lay Dying and The Sound and The Fury. However, showing may also be merely people doing and saying things without a chatty persona. An example of this sort of middle of the road type showing is seen in O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away or McCarthy’s Sutree. Telling and showing a story are both intermingled processes of telling a story and thereby including and excluding many people, places, and events. Though some stories may exclude a lot of events, no story is exhaustive, even for that matter War and Peace.

It seems nearly impossible then to retell a story that already formally tells (thus furthering the filtration of the events in the story) or to retell a story that accentuates the form of showing events as they happen. In either case retelling a story seems to subtract and add to the original story thereby creating something different (there are a few cases when a story can be precisely reduplicated but even those cases seem suspect). This seems to be the case even with stories told the first time around; the people, places, and events are filtered through a narrator. No matter which form of narration is employed, the narrator is a present filtration at least by implication. Thus, awareness of the form and limitation of narrative is indispensable no matter what telling or writing is at hand.

The student may find that self-awareness in the writing process heightens the accuracy and efficiency of his essays, for he may then begin to locate which narrative voice he naturally uses (fortunately or unfortunately), which he may then alter accordingly. The novelist may appropriate certain methods in writing that may enhance the fabric of the narrative and thereby avoid certain clunky foibles. The pastor may employ certain restraints while sharing a story thereby revealing a story that is vital in and of itself without distracting impositions. The historian may find that thinning the filter (fewer fabricated inferences) may prove to be much more exciting and informative for readers. And the person on the street corner retelling the comical happenings at work may find himself giving a much more lively account with more or less commentary. Thus, a crucial element in narrative voice is the awareness of the narrator, that he or she realize what he or she is and is not doing.