Catherine Brady | May/Summer 2013

NOTES

On a recent trip to Amsterdam, I made a pilgrimage to Rembrandt’s house, which the city has made into a museum. Rembrandt owned this house at the time he was forced to go through bankruptcy proceedings, and because court records preserved a detailed inventory of items to be sold for debt, the curators have been able to provision the house not only with period furniture (curtained, canopied beds) and the powders and ointments Rembrandt would have used to mix paint in his studio but also with objects he actually owned, right down to the paintings he had on his walls when he lived there. I made my way through the rooms torn between avaricious delight at this glimpse into his private life and a consciousness of the ruin referenced in every retrieved item. Up a narrow, winding staircase, as steep as a ladder, I discovered a room full of his reconstituted collections—armor and swords and costumes that served as props for his paintings, taxidermied animals (even an alligator from the New World), plaster busts, and chunks of coral.

This house stands as a tantalizingly elliptical version of biography. From the available evidence you might make many kinds of sympathetic leaps to conjecturing the man, but you’re also stymied by the evidence, which can’t fully illuminate the nature of genius. Coral. One can only guess at the fascination its intricately folded surfaces would have had for Rembrandt.

Every story stands as a kind of tantalizing biography too, in which the pressure of plot exposes the inner life of character in momentary, ambiguous ways: we are both tantalized by the partial glimpse and stymied by it. Anything constructed to constitute an unobstructed view would fail because it would drain off the mystery that compels our attention. Discussions about point of view often devolve into debates over presumed rules for consistency, when the more interesting question is, how is it integrated with plot to cloak and reveal by turns? Partiality applies to the nexus between plot and point of view in both senses of the word. The slant of a perspective character—her biased take on things—inevitably shapes the stakes of a work, and in addition, both plot and perspective grant us only a partial view of the whole, exploiting gaps and omissions to generate meaning. Just as a good plot strategically leaves out parts of the whole story, point of view capitalizes on gaps and obstructions to a clear, comprehensive view of events. Rather than thinking about how to employ point of view to ground a story very firmly, we should view it as a device for destabilizing the reader’s take on the dramatic situation.

Exploiting the Limits of a Character’s Perspective on the Action

Most perspective characters fall into a gray area in which they sometimes have the reader’s sympathy and agreement and at other times do not. This is the engine that drives dramatic tension. The most important arc of change in any work of fiction happens within the reader as she measures her values and insights against those of a character, and if she yields even a little—sympathizes with a perspective character whose actions dismay her or feels a pang of regret when he makes the seemingly right choice—then the writer has done his job. Once the choice of a perspective character determines the stakes of the plot, the writer’s work is just beginning: he must provide clues to the partiality of this character—to the way that the character’s biases inflect the facts of the story—and also exploit the limits of the character’s vantage point on the action in order to coax the reader to fill in the gaps.

To explore how this works, let’s start by looking at Junot Díaz’s first-person story “Israel,” told by a child narrator. Since a story told by a child narrator must generate dramatic payoff from a narrator’s limitations, it exemplifies how the general principle works. Along with his twelve-year-old brother, Rafa, nine-year-old Yunior has been packed off to relatives in the Dominican countryside because their mother has to keep working while the boys are out of school for the summer, and their father departed years ago to find work in the United States. The action of the plot takes place on a day when the boys go in search of a boy named Ysrael, who hides his disfigured face beneath a mask. At the outset, Rafa is the one “who wanted to see Ysrael,” fascinated by what’s beneath that mask.1 We first learn that these city boys are bored, bored, bored; when Rafa looks out the window at the countryside, he declares, “This… is shit.”2 At home Rafa ignores his little brother or torments him, but here they’re thrown together, and Yunior will do anything to hold on to his brother’s attention. When he recalls tagging after his brother in the woods, tracking him by following the patches of color in Rafa’s shirt, sent from the States by their father, he betrays the intensity of his attachment. Yunior is so afraid of losing sight of Rafa that “something inside me would sag like a sail.”3

Standing in for their absent father, Rafa attempts to teach and protect Yunior, and that includes ridiculing him for crying: “Do you think our Papi’s crying? Do you think that’s what he’s been doing the last six years?”4 Yunior swallows whole Rafa’s boasts about his predatory sexual conquests, even though when they go looking for girls together, they never find any. If Yunior trusts his brother’s knowingness, the reader doesn’t, on many counts. The kid is twelve! Díaz gives us room to supply from our very different experience what Yunior can’t—not just skepticism about Rafa’s claims but moral filters that measure this childhood against sheltered innocence.

Rafa and Yunior set off to catch Ysrael unaware in order to rip off his mask and get a look at what’s beneath it, which passes for sport among the local kids. Virtually every reader will admit to a childhood fascination with horror—an uncomfortable connection, but a definite one. Since it’s Rafa who is obsessed with unmasking Ysrael, why not tell the story from his point of view? Writers are often advised to choose as the perspective character the person who has the most compelling desire, yet desire per se isn’t enough to carry a story. Desire that comes at a high cost is. When the boys find Ysrael in a field, Rafa chats with him so he’ll let down his guard. Ysrael mentions that his father too is in the United States and that one day his father will bring him to America for plastic surgery on his face. Rafa sniggers, “You’re lying,” but his little brother is impressed by the store-bought kite Ysrael is flying and more willing to believe. Ysrael firmly contradicts Rafa when Rafa declares the doctors will kill him: “They’re American doctors.”5 This boy holds his own against Rafa’s certainty that everything is “shit,” with the consequence that Yunior talks to him, forgetting to treat him as a grotesque, forgetting the purpose of this trip. Both of them want their fathers to send for them, and hope is what Yunior must forfeit if he yields to his brother’s lessons.

Yunior’s softness heightens the shock of what happens next, a moment at which Díaz is fully prepared to risk the reader’s sympathy. Rafa bashes Ysrael over the head, and Yunior helps him roll the unconscious boy so he can rip off the mask. What Rafa discovers beneath it satisfies him: confirming proof that he is tough enough to take the ugliness of the world. But for Yunior the evidence is not yet so final. If he participated in the attack on Ysrael, he also “jumped back” at the sight of the face that Rafa contemplated with such steady resolve. Afterwards, as the brothers make their escape, Yunior says to Rafa, “They’re going to fix him,” and when Rafa “tiredly” informs him this will never happen, for the first time Yunior challenges his brother’s confidence: “How do you know?”6 Within seconds he’s going along with his brother’s next scheme, so the story ends with the narrator still torn between competing allegiances.

Yunior possesses what I’d call “instrumental instability” in a perspective character, which is why he makes a more potent choice for a narrator than his brother. He falters as he strives to live up to Rafa’s macho example, capable of colluding with his brother in the attack on Ysrael but hampered by his instinctive identification with their victim. Tension is heightened because we have come to recognize the moral and emotional risks of either choice. Ultimately we feel more sympathy for both brothers because we understand what the nine-year-old does not: if he emulates Rafa, the only father he’s got, he won’t have to succumb to a sense of abandonment and loss. Whichever way Yunior jumps, he’ll pay a very high price. The relationship between the reader and the perspective character is supposed to be a troubled, uncertain relationship, one that pressures readers to shift. A reader of “Israel” who started off automatically assuming that innocence and vulnerability are preferable to Rafa’s hardened stance would be forced to contend with the possibility that Yunior can ill afford these prerogatives. The threat of vulnerability is brought home for the reader by details such as Rafa’s emblematic shirt disappearing from sight. Touches like this enable a writer to control the range of interpretation—to counter readers who’d regard Rafa and Yunior as two little monsters or view them as pathetic victims. Please note that plentiful clues are required; otherwise, a reader who can’t make sense of contradictions will chalk them up to writer error.

Once you’ve chosen a perspective character, you’re yoked to that character’s limitations, and yet figuring out how to get information to the reader behind the character’s back means you get to play with every possible permutation of the wavering sympathetic connection between them. When we’re struggling with a draft, bound by the limitations of any single perspective character, it’s all too easy to imagine these limits as a hurdle we’re trying to jump. How do I make sure my narrator has access to this or that necessary fact? How do I get the reader to recognize that the perspective character is misreading the situation? How do I tempt the reader to acknowledge the persuasiveness of this character’s slant, even if she might judge events differently than the character? But a perspective character’s limitations are a veritable gold mine of dramatic tension. His uncertain reliability provides the key.

Perspective and Hidden Symmetry in Plot

The purpose of plot structure is to enable discovery, providing for genuine surprise as the reader measures what she knows for sure against what remains uncertain. Like the final flourish in a magic trick, the reveal in a well-made plot is never exactly what it seems. When we deploy perspective to enrich this effect, presumed rules for consistency are over-ridden. James Joyce’s “The Dead” begins as Gabriel Conroy arrives at his elderly aunts’ house for a party, and though Gabriel will be the perspective character for most of the story, we first see him from the perspective of Lily, the young maid of the household, and then only for as long as it takes him to hand her his coat and make brief small talk. Lily’s perspective provides background on the socioeconomic status of the aunts, the style of their parties, and their reverential regard for their intellectual nephew Gabriel, all of which could have been delivered via his perspective, so why does Joyce start in a perspective to which he never returns?

Because perspective never delivers only information—it also captures tension. Unlike the later pages of the story, which hew close to the educated diction of Gabriel, the third-person voice of these few initial pages employs Lily’s vernacular: “They [the aunts] were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers. Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife. Besides, they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed.”7 The seeming asymmetry of Joyce’s perspective choice heightens tonal contrasts and accomplishes breathtaking structural symmetry by shifting to Gabriel’s perspective at the moment he condescends to Lily: “Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname.”8 Those three syllables—“con-a-roy”—provide more than an economical class marker; by literally renaming Gabriel, they suggest that this social milieu won’t allow for his refinement. Having been locked inside Lily’s provincial perspective, a reader is situated to have a more troubled response to Gabriel’s condescension. What better way to introduce a character whose uncertainty about his superiority is at stake in the story?

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia is useful here, because it emphasizes that many voices are integrated in a work of fiction, which is a “system” of languages that can incorporate multiple speech types—authorial speech, interior monologue, the variegated speech patterns of a host of characters, philosophical statements, and idioms that may be more or less distant from the narrator’s.9 A novel about a working-class boy infatuated with the manners of the rich can incorporate his mother’s folk wisdom, his own street slang, and the diction of his wealthy employer. By selecting for a particular background, well-handled perspective offers linguistic clues that reinforce the plot clues to the nature of the perspective character’s dilemma. A writer can create “the background necessary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot be perceived, and without which they ‘do not sound.’”10 The reader has to read the contrasts between the many voices a work of fiction might contain in order to conjure the distinctive slant of the writer: here’s yet another way in which artfully managed point of view capitalizes on gaps the reader must fill in.

We’re so conditioned to understanding point of view as a unifying element in a story, we forget that it should also function as a destabilizing element. An utterly consistent perspective leaves no room for a reader to question a judgment or discern subtext, yet some certainty is essential if the reader is to recognize ambiguity as purposeful and precisely framed. Good stories depend on the tension between coherence and fragmentation, and the choices we make about plot and point of view help us to teeter between these two poles. In her seventy-six-page novella, “The Love of a Good Woman,” Alice Munro masterfully demonstrates how point of view choices are intricately bound up with this plot principle. Connective tissue we expect in other stories is often mysteriously missing from Munro’s stories, and on the other hand, these stories seem to burst with material that threatens to become many unruly stories. “The Love of a Good Woman” consists of a prologue and four numbered sections, set at disparate times and told from disparate points of view in order to screen certain things from us, to keep the reader in the position of someone who has to speculate. Here’s my synopsis:

Prologue. In some unspecified present moment, the narrative describes old-fashioned optometrist’s tools that are on display in a town’s museum. You could categorize this as “third-person objective,” and there’s not a trace of a character in the description.

I. Jutland. In Jutland in the spring of 1951 a trio of boys discovers a car submerged in a river, and inside is the body of the local optometrist, Dr. Willens, whom they recognize. Each of the boys goes home for the mid-day meal and says not one word of this discovery, Bud to a more or less ordinary family, Jimmy to a family that has fallen on hard times but perseveres with dignity, and Cece to a home dominated by an alcoholic father whose abusiveness is tacitly ignored by the community. A generously omniscient narrator informs us about the social world of these boys; they’re a collective from which the narrator maintains a steady distance until each goes home and the narrator follows them separately. At section’s end, the boys reunite and decide to report to the local policeman what they’ve found.

II. Heart Failure. This section is told in third-person close narration, with Enid, a thirty-seven year old nurse, as the perspective character. In a neighboring town, some years after the boys made this discovery, Enid is working as a live-in nurse to Mrs. Quinn. She’s awkwardly polite with the woman’s shy farmer husband, Rupert, and tries to reform Mrs. Quinn’s slovenly household. In the throes of dying from kidney disease, Mrs. Quinn is angry, spiteful, delirious, and insinuatingly resentful of Enid’s efforts to care for her husband and two young daughters.

III. Mistake. This is weird third-person narration: essentially a reported dramatic monologue in which Mrs. Quinn confesses to Enid, told entirely in Mrs. Quinn’s diction, with no access to the character’s thoughts other than her reported speech. Mrs. Quinn offers Enid an ugly explanation for how the optometrist’s body wound up in the river. She claims that when Willens came to the house for an eye exam, as he did for many rural clients, she and he would play sex games together, but one day her husband caught them. Rupert attacked Willens in a rage and killed him, and then his wife helped him to cover up the crime, hiding the optometrist’s tools and sending Rupert off to drive the man’s car into the river.

IV. Lies. Mrs. Quinn dies. In this third-person close narration, Enid’s notions of moral perfection and self-sacrifice demand that she confront Rupert and persuade him to turn himself in. But can she believe Mrs. Quinn’s dying confession? And then what would become of those two little girls? What would become of the tentative romantic interest Rupert has shown in her? In the last scene, alone with Rupert, she chooses to say nothing.

How do these parts add up to one story? Wildly varied point of view choices stretch the tension of fragmented plot structure nearly to the breaking point. In the absence of obvious narrative connections, we’re forced to look to the periphery. We anticipate that the obscure clue offered in the prologue will matter, and it’s not just a literal clue but a metafictional one that promises coherence. The description of an ophthalmoscope immediately alerts us to attend to the notion of various lenses for viewing experience, and in flirting with elements of the mystery genre, Munro slyly emphasizes that in this kind of mystery, the hunt for clues does not resolve ambiguity. In the “Jutland” section, which comprises more than a third of the novella, the boys’ discovery of the body leads us to anticipate an unfolding mystery about the man’s death, but then the omniscient narrator veers to explore the separate domestic life of each boy with such energy that this clue seems tangential. The narrator illuminates the hypocrisy that euphemizes Cece’s father’s abusiveness, and then, in describing Jimmy’s family, calls our attention to the moral virtues of making discreet accommodations: “This was a family who accepted burdens of one kind or another with even less fuss than they accepted the weather. In fact, nobody in that house would have spoken of Jimmy’s father’s condition or Aunt Mary’s eyesight as burdens or problems, any more than they would of Fred’s shyness. Drawbacks and disadvantages were not to be noticed, not to be distinguished from their opposites.”11 In this section, the use of freely omniscient narration is justified first of all by its economy: only this choice could enable Munro to cover as much ground as she does in depicting how social convention shields both the good and the bad. Furthermore, this choice provides a crucial setup for Enid’s seemingly unconnected story; we’re reading her perspective against both the boys’ naiveté and the narrator’s knowing sense of the compromises people make in order to get by.

The boys’ very different family histories raise questions about the value of accommodation, while Enid’s choices are at first shaped by the absolute ideal of the self-sacrificing woman, who cares for other people’s families rather than creating her own. The boys, faced with a shocking discovery, fail to report it immediately, and Enid is faced with the same dilemma—whether or not to report what she learned from Mrs. Quinn. Allusions to perversion abound in all the sections, starting with the arguable perversity of normal boys who don’t bother to report a dead body and on through to Mrs. Quinn’s sexual escapades, all to help us see the potential cruelty of Enid’s either/or ideal of virtue—its perversion.

By the time Munro fulfills the literal plot promise of a mystery, we’re more compelled by the disruptive placement of Mrs. Quinn’s confession in the middle of Enid’s two sections; the ugly secret interrupts the narrative of the virtuous woman. Enid makes a point of working for poor families, accepting pay only to be “fair to the other women who did the same kind of nursing” and then finding ways to return her salary “in the form of children’s shoes and winter coats and trips to the dentist and Christmas toys.”12 Every coarse word in Mrs. Quinn’s confession threatens this high-mindedness; describing her sex games with Dr. Willens, she concludes: “And that was the signal for him to get her down and thump her like an old billy goat. Right on the bare floor to knock her up and down and try to bash her into pieces. Dingey on him like a blowtorch.”13 Heteroglossia is brilliantly called into play, offering sharp tonal contrast that intensifies dramatic conflict. When a point of view choice is so dynamically entwined with structure, we don’t quibble over the rules.

But Mrs. Quinn made her confession in the last, delirious stages of dying, leaving room for doubt—leaving room for Enid to decide whether to turn in Rupert or try to make a life with him. When Enid thinks about the secrets that everyone knows and lives with, we get another bountiful payoff for the stories of those boys. The plot ends before a possible romance gets off the ground, but we get a faint clue to the future when Enid imagines how she’d restore order to the house if she became Rupert’s wife. By her choices in point of view, Munro coaxes us to attend to hidden figurative patterns that ultimately demonstrate the coherence of these tenuously connected narratives: they do develop a central conflict. There’s a productive tension between the fullness of each individual story, including that of each boy’s family, and its obliqueness, its fiercely partial view. We’ll never know if we can trust Mrs. Quinn’s confession, motivated by jealousy of the living and their happiness; neither her vindictiveness nor Enid’s fastidious morality seems to admit the other. Munro’s perspective choices enable us to fill in key gaps in the plot, with one last literal clue to the speculative nature of the entire enterprise: maybe the optometrist’s tools ended up in the museum because in cleaning the house, Enid discovered where Mrs. Quinn had hidden them. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Enid’s noble notions are muddied by self-interest at the end. Munro convincingly demonstrates how we might execute point of view strategies to shift our readers’ attention from literal plot concerns to buried connections—barely glimpsed ones. A hidden symmetry.

Retrospective Narration and Plot Sequence

When we structure a plot so that a scene in which a man prunes his wife’s rose bushes to ugly stubs is followed by a scene in which she lets his beloved dog escape out the door, we’re banking on sequence to suggest the second action is a consequence of the first. Just as we sequence plot events to make the gaps in the story speak volumes, we can also sequence access to a character’s thoughts or narrator’s commentary in order to complicate literal suspense. Because retrospective narration is so firmly and obviously bound up with plot choices—by definition offering us two interconnected story lines of then and now—it foregrounds how strategic sequencing of plot is enhanced by point of view decisions. Retrospective stories interest us not because they are told from the fullness of comprehension but because this structure signals that past events still trouble a narrator, and the references to her present fate or perspective reshape the questions of the past rather than answering them.

To underscore the notion that the nexus between plot and point of view can take many forms, let’s consider a third-person story that is told retrospectively. Alice McDermott’s “Someone” begins as the teenaged perspective character, Marie, meets Walter Hartnett, a young man she’s known since childhood, on the sidewalk. After he observes that her squint “makes your whole face look funny,” she goes home to practice her expression in the mirror, with a resentment charged by sexual insecurity. That afternoon, Walter calls to ask for a date. The critical attention he has paid to Marie is revised by this fact, and the next paragraph offers a terrific instance of sequencing a reference to future events at a spot where they cue us to ask focused questions about the retrospective action. In a flash-forward to a time when Marie’s own daughters have begun dating, Marie advises, “‘Here’s a good rule: If he looks over your head while you’re talking, get rid of him. Walter Hartnett ….’” Before she can finish that last sentence, her daughters “throw up their hands: ‘Jesus, Mom, no more Walter Hartnett stories.’”14 This passage exploits a plot gap—Marie has only just accepted a first date, but clearly, there were more—and forewarns us that Walter disappointed her, giving away something of the plot. We learn, before the story of their courtship unfolds, that Marie has married someone else and had children; this man didn’t ruin her life. Yet this is ambiguously shaded. Marie’s aphoristic rule for dating reduces Walter Hartnett to a mere cautionary example, but if her daughters’ exasperation transforms this to comedy, it also hints that he lingers in their mother’s mind.

Though there are other references to the future, this is the only flash-forward in the story, demonstrating the large effect that can be gained from relatively small touches. After Marie and Walter have dated for a long while, Walter abruptly and cruelly breaks off their engagement—he’s decided to marry a prettier, more well-off girl because “it’s the best-looking people who have the best chances.”15 Marie’s brother attempts to console her by telling her there’s “a lot of cruelty in the world.” He shares a story from his childhood. When he and other neighborhood kids played a vicious prank on a blind man, a younger Walter was the first to reassure the man it was only a joke. Marie thinks her brother tells her this to prove that “Walter had once been kind.” But the coda to the story is her brother’s admission that after that day, he avoided the blind man whenever he could; he felt the lingering effect of cruelty and could not reconcile himself to it as the way of the world. “Someone” ends a few lines later, when the heartbroken Marie asks her brother, “‘Who’s going to love me?’” and he answers, “‘Someone will.’”16 This climax reconfigures what we might have understood from the single reference to Marie’s present life so early in the story. Yes, she went on to find someone else and scale her devastation to the form of precautionary advice, but now we must read this against her brother’s implicit acknowledgement that cruelty can’t be dismissed: recovery from hurt can never make its shattering power vanish. Marie’s dismissive tone may be evidence not of complacency but of the scar Walter left; the retrospective plot does not reveal whether she dared again to marry for love.

Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table deploys a much more elaborate use of retrospection, in which the essential past story of the narrator’s boyhood journey from Sri Lanka to England by ship is spliced with chapters that offer glimpses of his adult life since that time, from young manhood to a present time of middle-age. Like the author, the narrator is named Michael and became a well-known writer as an adult. The “cat’s table” is the “least privileged place” in the ship’s dining room, a gathering of misfits that includes Michael and two other boys traveling solo, Cassius and Ramadhin.17 The trio of boys takes every possible advantage of their unsupervised freedom on the ship, with the fierce, uncompromising Cassius in the lead and the gentle, sickly Ramadhin hanging back. Literally and figuratively, the boys spy on adults and take confusing lessons from the strangers whose lives rawly abut theirs for the length of the journey. The retrospective narrator early on notifies us that his narrative project is to “try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper or little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future.”18

On their adventures aboard the ship, the boys wander in and out of the lives of others, and they also stray across the line between trivial mischief and large, even criminal, risks. They can’t quite connect their own actions to consequences in the real world, the world of adults, a link that only the intervening years of the narrator’s life can supply. Coincidence and accident involve the boys in the pivotal dramatic event of this novel, the escape attempt of a shackled prisoner on board the ship. Not only does Michael’s beloved cousin Emily, a fellow passenger, play a role in this failed attempt but also Cassius intervenes from an instinctive need to ally himself with the outsider. A number of the adults in the boys’ world align on opposite sides of this conflict, and the most sympathetic of them are also “in the wrong” in taking the prisoner’s side. There are high costs for their romantic willingness to align with the underdog.

As the narrative unfolds, moving back and forth between the journey and intervening events, the reader is constantly reminded that the wild boy has, indeed, been smuggled into the future of the temperate man. The adult Michael, once more attached to the anarchic Cassius, remains friends only with the gentle Ramadhin and can’t recover his boyhood connection with Emily. Early on, it’s hard to match the boy and the man, and the narrator withholds till the novel’s end disclosure of the full story of the prisoner’s escape attempt and its reverberations in his own life and Emily’s.

The sequencing of past and subsequent action in retrospective narration determines how the novel will cohere, and a sequence at the midpoint of this novel provides a key that helps the reader to pursue connections throughout the whole. First, Michael recounts the night that the ship passed through the Suez Canal, “sidling alongside a concrete dock with crates stacked into giant pyramids and men running with electrical cables and baggage carts alongside the slow-moving Oronsay” in a darkness “various and full of suggestion.”19 Perched precariously on the bow railing, Michael and Cassius watch the shore: “the fragmentary tableaux below us—a merchant with his stall of food, engineers talking by a bonfire, the unloading of refuse, all of them, all of this, we knew we would never see again. So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.”20 To reinforce this sense of how a life might be shaped by contingent and chance encounters, the narrator adds, “We could have fallen and lost our ship and begun another fate—as paupers or as princes.”21

The very next section begins with the retrospective narrator telling us, “There was a time in my late twenties when I suddenly had an urge to meet with Cassius again.”22 After their boyhood trip, he lost contact with Cassius, who has also become an artist. Only the accident of coming across an announcement of an exhibition of Cassius’s paintings leads Michael to the gallery where he hopes to see Cassius. He’s disappointed that Cassius is not there, “but his absence did not matter. For what I saw in the paintings was Cassius himself.” Although he at first mistook the paintings for abstractions, Michael recognizes that they depict that night-time trip through the Suez Canal: “All this enlarged me, and I did not know why. I suppose it clarified how close Cassius and I had been, real brothers. For he also had witnessed the people I saw that night, with whom we had felt so oddly aligned, whom we would never see again.”23 If he recognizes in the paintings “the exact angle of vision Cassius and I had that night… watching, which was where Cassius was emotionally, when he was doing these paintings,” Michael concludes, “Good-bye, we were saying to all of them. Good-bye.”24 Because this scene follows immediately on the vivid evocation of that journey through the Suez Canal, the reader is viscerally presented with a paradox: the elegiac act both announces the irretrievable loss of the past and brings back those strangers who mattered, however briefly.

Furthermore, sequencing alerts us to the potential self-betrayal in the narrator’s earlier observation about “interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.” Michael relives his intense feelings for Cassius at the gallery, yet he also disengages (“good-bye”) when he signs his name in the gallery’s guestbook but does not provide an address. If art can make Michael feel “enlarged” by a reawakened sense of identification, this is a problematic substitute for real involvement.

After this chapter closes, a reader will ask different questions about the unfolding story of the boy and the man, an adult who is drawn to gentleness, but never quite close enough. He’s eventually not enough of a friend to Ramadhin and not enough of a husband to his wife, who leaves him. Despite his sympathy for Emily, he can’t relieve the guilt that haunts her in later years. Both Michael and Cassius have remained locked in the isolation of the observer, which may be a demand of art but may also be a consequence of the tragic night in which their acquaintances aboard ship were also “oddly aligned,” and they witnessed how irrevocable real risk actually is. Finally, all the novel can confirm for us is that Michael honors the fierce romantic impulse to “protect” without regard for cost or consequence, even if he has fallen short. At novel’s end, he informs us, “I have no idea if Cassius reads, or if he scorns reading. In any case, this account is for him. For the other friend from my youth.”25

There are no prescriptions for how you might employ perspective in the service of dynamic plotting; there are only generative principles, at work whenever a writer struggles to hammer out how to grant the reader the right partial glimpse, the one that will tease and tempt a reader to continue revising her impressions. The structural coherence provided by point of view is by design a deceptive one. Rather than guiding the reader firmly and steadily through the minefield of dramatic conflict, strategically handled point of view destabilizes the relationships among reader, character, and narrator, serving fluidity and indeterminacy as well as grounding the reader, precariously balancing between the two demands. You have to gulp before you step out onto that tightwire.        

Catherine Brady is the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her most recent story collection is The Mechanics of Falling, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction. She directs the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Notes

1. Junot Díaz, “Ysrael,” in Drown (New York: Riverhead, 1996), p. 3.
2. Ibid., p. 4.
3. Ibid., p. 6.
4. Ibid., p. 14.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
6. Ibid., p. 19.
7. James Joyce, “The Dead,” in Dubliners: Text, Criticism and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (1969; reprint, New York: Penguin, Viking Critical Library, 1977), 176. This analysis of the story appears in slightly different form in Catherine Brady, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 94-95.
8. Ibid., 177.
9. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 263.
10. Ibid., p. 278.
11. Alice Munro, “The Love of a Good Woman,” in The Love of a Good Woman (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 20.
12. Ibid., p. 44.
13. Ibid., p. 62.
14. Alice McDermott, “Someone,” The New Yorker (January 30, 2012): p. 61.
15. Ibid., p. 64.
16. Ibid., p. 66.
17. Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table (New York: Knopf, 2011), p. 8.
18. Ibid., p. 4.
19. Ibid., pp. 127–28.
20. Ibid., pp. 128–29.
21. Ibid., p. 129.
22. Ibid., p. 130.
23. Ibid., p. 131.
24. Ibid., p. 132.
25. Ibid., p. 262.