"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" - Narrator as Editorializer
I recently finished reading Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and it got me thinking about the role of the narrator in fiction. Briefly, for those unfamiliar, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is the story of the decades-long marriage of a Czech woman and her philandering husband, who does not believe in a connection between sex and love, which gives him all the excuse he needs to sleep with whomever he wants, much to his wife’s chagrin, though she accepts it nonetheless.
The novel begins with a philosophical exploration of Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return, whereby one must live their lives as though it would be acceptable to them to live it over and over again for all of eternity. The narrator pontificates that it is only through the notion of eternal return that life can ever have meaning. For if something happens but a single time, it is a mere wisp, hardly worth reflecting on. But if it happens again and again and again, each time exactly the same as the time before, then it creates a kind of groove within the fabric of reality. Solidifies it. So that it becomes real.
From there he introduces us to his protagonist with the line, “I have been thinking about Tomas for many years.” He goes on to tell us that Tomas is not necessarily real, though he could be. He is, rather, a product of his, the narrator’s, imagination. Thus our story begins. This opening salvo is not unique to the opening. It recurs time and again at the narrator’s behest, whenever he wishes to comment on, editorialize or philosophize about the story he is telling, which he narrates with some degree of distance.
For most of the time I’ve been writing I never thought too much about the role of the narrator. To me, the narrator was synonymous with the writer. In other words, me. The narrator was simply the person telling the story. However that’s not all it is. There is actually another dimension to storytelling that is often lost on most readers. This goes even for first person narratives. There is the writer, of course. Then there’s the narrator. Then there is the protagonist. It is the narrator’s job to imbue the story with point of view. It is the window through which the reader peers. It determines the kind of language the story utilizes, how close or distant to the action, the perspective, moral, philosophical or otherwise, that infuses the narrative with meaning.
Oftentimes, in fact probably most of the time, the narrator is practically invisible. If you read Cormac McCarthy, for instance, the narrator is an omniscient godlike figure in the sense of detailing the action from a distant, dispassionate point-of-view, while at the same time without usually being privy to the thoughts in the characters’ heads, so it becomes a novel strictly of action, without much interiority.
If you read a novel from Hubert Selby Jr, you’re likely to get the opposite. A very narrow and intimate window into the racing thoughts of the characters, with less emphasis on the actions themselves.
Occasionally you get someone like Henry Miller, where the narrator and the author appear indistinguishable, though they are not, because any author is still bound by the constraints of point of view—you cannot show all points of view at all times, you must pick and choose—and that is precisely what the narrator is.
In commercial fiction the goal is to not actually ever notice that there is a narrator. Readers don’t want the fourth wall broken. They want to be immersed in the story and forget themselves within it.
One really unique writer when it comes to thinking about the narrator is Philip Roth, particularly his American Trilogy. In these novels you have multiple tiers. There is the narrator, of course, looking in on the life of the writer Nathan Zuckerman. Then there is Zuckerman himself, becoming interested in some character he wishes to write about. You have that character then telling Zuckerman the story of his life, which Zuckerman then translates for literary flare into the book we are reading.
While there is probably not a best way to handle the use of the narrator, as it will usually depend on the type of story one wants to tell, I probably prefer the less obvious incarnations of the Cormac McCarthy/Hubert Selby variety. Philip Roth is great, and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” has it’s moments, but I often found myself getting exhausted by the constant editorializing of Kundera’s narrator. As though he did not trust the reader to develop his or her own interpretation, and had to continually chime in to inform us of the philosophical ramifications of what we were reading. By the last fifty pages I was mostly tired of it. It had all gotten very heavy-handed and I longed for that loss of self I experience in those novels without such an editorializing narrator. It often felt kind of lazy. Rather than put us into a scene and allow that scene to play out, I was always at a kind of remove and that irritated me.
But I have started to think about the narrator more constantly in my own work. I’ve found it useful in developing a point of view for the story to imagine a particular individual, their quirks and sense of humor, what are the things they care about, what kinds of things they notice, etc, and then to imagine that person telling the story. For writers starting out, point-of-view is probably one of the most challenging aspects of storytelling to command, and this approach may assist in furthering their understanding of how to tell the story, once they have decided what story they want to tell.