Narration...

Just recently in Spanish, we read a short story by a contemporary Catalunian author. In it, a detective goes to the library and falls asleep reading a book in his office and personal library. When he awakes, he is shocked to discover a woman, who appears to know him, sitting and staring at him. Startled and embarrassed that he doesn't remember the name of this woman that apparently knows him, he listens patiently as she admonishes him for his irresponsibility, his incompetence, and the wrong he did her. Eventually he loses interest in her reprimands and she becomes extremely angry. Heated words and tears come into play and, long, crazy story REALLY short, he finds out she is mad at him because she is a character in a novel and thinks he is the irresponsible author that didn't finish her story. She begs him to have an emotional investment in her story and her actions. (This is the part relevant to this blog post but if you are interested, he isn't the author, the woman shoots the detective, and the last lines are the actually author lamenting how bad this scene is.) E.L. Doctorow would really piss off this woman. Doctorow's narration is detached, uncaring, and full of irony and sarcasm. Doctorow presents his characters pretty individually and then slowly and subtly rips away at them or supports them with carefully chosen and seemingly ambiguous language. At times he is unclear about his position on an issue or character while at others he is blatantly bashing or supporting another.

Although this narration style seems to annoy many people, I like Doctorow's way of describing his characters. I think that Doctorow didn't want his book to be casually popular to the general public and he shows this through his prose. He wrote for an educated, actively engaged audience, one willing to impose different tones upon the words on the page to get the full picture. He wrote so that the whole book could easily be read with little thought in one voice without regard to any of the other voices that could communicate the work. The nuances are lost on those who don't make an effort to appreciate them and the book loses much of its significance. After the initial frustration of trying to figure out where Doctorow stands as a third party, I began to understand and look for the different ways Doctorow was communicating underlying meaning through neutral prose.

Another important part of his narration is his divergence from being a third person narrator on a few occasions. A point from an article I just read while searching for a good panel presentation article gave me a whole new argument on why Doctorow chooses to narrate from where he does. So, this article was talking about how Doctorow was showing the mutability of history and perspective and whatnot.  Jesus Benito Sanchez talks about this novelist who sat in his room on a chair, continually adjusting the position of his chair trying to find the perfect angle to view life from. Doctorow too must deal with the issue of from what angle to view his story. Because he didn't want to fix the perspective, thus contradicting his idea of dynamic history, he discards this as an option. Another option would be to assume the position of omniscient narrator. Again, to avoid fixing his narrative voice, he rejects this narrative voice. Doctorow, instead, opts for an ambiguous narrator whose detachment and distance from the characters continually changes to provide different perspectives. The occasions where Doctorow does narrate through a perspective of one of his characters are, evidently, very significant, particularly the perspective of the little boy. And I could write a whole other blog post on just his perspective and what it means so I think I will.

In short, I like Doctorow's narration. He is engaging and challenges his readers to think. As I continue reading, and with the aid of some pieces of literary criticism, I see more and more significance in Doctorow's voice and I look forward to talking about it in the upcoming panel presentations and my next blog post.