One more point about point of view

Talking to Laura yesterday got me thinking....

Much of my theories about first person point of view - which, God help us all, I am actually going to be lecturing on this summer at the Hollins College writing workshop - stem back to a single event from my childhood.

I was three or four. This is the first memory which I'm sure is an actual memory, neither a story I was told by my relentlessly story-telling family or a snapshot I saw in an album. The reason I know this is that I don't see myself as a character in the story - I see the story as I would have seen it if I were actually there.

Here goes. The entryway to my family home was a staircase of brick, leading up to a landing. There was a row of shrubs in front of the house. I would play out in the little protected area between the brick wall and the shrubs, pretending this was a fort or a castle or a boat or whatever the fantasy du jour required. Also, I realize now, when I went out into that little space I was hiding. I was always hiding as a child. Hiding and spying. It was a behavior that would serve me well in my later life as a journalist and novelist.

On this particular day my father was working in the lawn and my grandfather, who lived next door, approached him. They began to argue. I didn't know then and don't know now what they were fighting about but I instinctively knew that I was overhearing something I wasn't meant to overhear. Neither man had noticed me behind the shrubs or I'm fairly sure the argument would never have taken place - we were a dignified family, not inclined to open confrontation, and the adults certainly did not fight in front of the children. That's probably why I found this scene so fascinating. Up until that day I don't think I'd even known if was possible for adults to disagree.

Now here's where point of view comes in. On two sides I was surrounded by brick. On one side the shrubs were high and the only direction in which I could see out at all was partially obscured by lower shrubs. It was literally a limited point of view. I was so absorbed in trying to figure out what my father and grandfather were doing that I was shocked when suddenly (at least suddenly to me) my grandmother appeared. She had been standing on the lawn too, but on the part of the yard I couldn't see, the part obscured by the brick stairwell. She ran up to them and put her hand on my grandfather's arm and just then I was conscious of a noise above me and realized that my mother had also observed the fight. She had been standing in the doorway at the top of the stairwell.

When I think about point of view this simple little story always comes back to me. Partly because it's such a concrete way to consider what point of view means: Where is your character standing? What's her angle on the action? And fron that angle what would she logically observe or notice? But also I think this story has stuck with me because it shows that point of view is partly about what the character sees - in this case the argument between my fahter and grandfather - but that point of view is equally about what the character doesn't see. I couldn't see what was on the other side of the brick wall or above me on the stairwell so it was a shock when my grandmother and mother appeared.

Ergo my conclusion. First person point of view is just as much about what your character doesn't know as it is about what she does know.
Now I try to ask myself: What does my character fail to understand about the situation? What does she not know about herself? Where are the literal and metaphorical blind spots? What in the story is going to surprise her when it appears? Will there be things that the reader will see before she does?

And this also speaks to something I think is a misconception about first person, i.e., that the narrator knows the exact same amount that the writer knows. Someone once said to me that he was surprised I was so wedded to the first person pov because it had a single major drawback, i.e., you lose the omniscient voice. I agree that this can be a little problematic....your character can't know about conversations that took place when she wasn't in the room, or describe the troubled childhood of someone she just met. But there are ways around these limitations and most writers figure them out quickly enough. I think my friend who was critical was speaking of a deeper issue - the belief that the first person point of view forces the reader to accept reality just as the first person narrator is dishing it out to them. I disagree. I think there are plenty of ways for the author to alert the reader that the narrator is wrong about certain things.

Still with me? It's hard to talk about these things and that's why I'm nervous about the Hollins lecture. Maybe an example would help. My first novel is narrated by a character named Elyse who is essentially a reliable narrator, i.e., she isn't insane or mentally handicapped, she isn't on drugs or on trial for murder or a 2 year old child. The reader can basically accept Elyse's interpretation of events as sound. But yet Elyse is flawed, as she must be in order to work as not merely the narrator of the story but also the main character. Her primary flaw is that she is impulsive. One of the ways I showed this in the story was to write in present tense so that we see her doing things and regretting them or questioning them almost immediately. Another way is that I have her frequently interrupting other characters when they speak, cutting them off midsentence in her impulsive, impatient way.

Here's what I hope. That the reader will understand that while Elyse sees a lot and knows a lot - she's presented as a bright and thoughtful person - that she doesn't see everything and know everything. I hope that the reader will sense when Kim the writer is pointing out "Elyse shouldn't have interrupted Kelly there....Kelly's making sense" or "Phil has a point, Elyse just can't see it" or even "Elyse is totally wrong on this one."

So there's a point of view within a point of view. Kim the child standing behind the bushes can't see much. She's the first person narrator of the story. Kim the adult remembering the event can see more - she knows what happened later, she realizes that the mother and grandmother were also in the yard, she can come up with more elaborate interpretations of what caused the fight. She's the writer of the story. So if we accept that the writer and narrator are different people it seems logical that we can also accept that the writer knows things the narrator can't know and can thus use the poor narrator's blindness, or at least her limited point of view, as a means to advance the story.

Hard to talk about as this blog, I fear, painfully illustrates. But still I think, worth considering. Sometimes I just stop myself while writing, while sailing along on the wave of a first person narration and ask myself "But what's there that this person isn't seeing? What's on the other side of that brick wall?" This question almost always leads me to something interesting. Maybe even a plot point. And God knows we can never have too many of them.

But that's another subject.