Odd writing choices

[Djmac1031]

So I'm about halfway through an audio version of the H.G. Wells classic "War Of The Worlds" when it occurred to me that the 1st person narrator has never once been referred to by name, not by himself or by other characters.

Wells takes it a step farther when at one point, the narrator begins to recount the adventures of "my brother" who, again, is never referred to by name.

The story still works quite well, and so far there was only one spot where things got confusing when the brother gets into a tussle with three other unnamed men. Lots of "he" and "him" floating around and it was tough to follow who was doing what to whom.

Ive written a few short stories where I chose not to name my narrator, but I find it an odd, interesting choice to write an entire novel without ever once naming the main character.

There are other characters that do not receive names either. The narrator spends some time with a character only referred to as "the curate," and the brother meets two women in his travels that he takes up with. While one is named, the other is referred to only as the "sister in law."

Got me thinking about other odd choices in writing, whether it be classic or modern literature, or our own stories.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Just finished a story, or moved it to pending, rather. I got to the last scene and had to read the entire thing to realize I’d gone just that. One of the minor characters needed to call the MC by name and she didn’t have one.

It’s an odd feeling…

 

[dirk2024]

So I'm about halfway through an audio version of the H.G. Wells classic "War Of The Worlds" when it occurred to me that the 1st person narrator has never once been referred to by name, not by himself or by other characters.

Wells takes it a step farther when at one point, the narrator begins to recount the adventurous of "my brother" who, again, is never referred to by name.

The story still works quite well, and so far there was only one spot where things got confusing when the brother gets into a tussle with three other unnamed men. Lots of "he" and "him" floating around and it was tough to follow who was doing what to whom.

Ive written a few short stories where I chose not to name my narrator, but I find it an odd, interesting choice to write an entire novel without ever once naming the main character.

There are other characters that do not receive names either. The narrator spends some time with a character only referred to as "the curate," and the brother meets two women in his travels that he takes up with. While one is named, the other is referred to only as the "sister in law."

Got me thinking about other odd choices in writing, whether it be classic or modern literature, or our own stories.

Who wrote this post?

 

[YmaOHyd]

Got me thinking about other odd choices in writing, whether it be classic or modern literature, or our own stories.

The Jack Reacher books are sometimes in first person and sometimes in third.

 

[Djmac1031]

The Jack Reacher books are sometimes in first person and sometimes in third.

In the same book? or you mean they switch between books?

 

[YmaOHyd]

In the same book? or you mean they switch between books?

Both. Mostly the books are all in first or all in third, but there are a few in first where he'll switch to third to tell the audience something Reacher doesn't know yet. So there are first-person books, third-person books and first-person books that switch to third to tell you something Lee Child needs the reader to know but can't figure out how to convey -- his words, not mine:

“Sometimes the story requires the reader to know something that Reacher hasn’t yet discovered. If that’s the case, I’ll use third person. Third person allows the reader to essentially see around corners.”

 

[Djmac1031]

Both. Mostly the books are all in first or all in third, but there are a few in first where he'll switch to third to tell the audience something Reacher doesn't know yet. So there are first-person books, third-person books and first-person books that switch to third to tell you something Lee Child needs the reader to know but can't figure out how to convey -- his words, not mine:

That's definitely odd. You'd think once he realized this problem he'd have just changed the whole story to third person.

I went through perspective shifts in my Jenna series, where as I added more characters I realized it would be easier to get inside their heads if I changed it from the original 1st person male lead perspective to 3rd person.

But I was (still am) just some amateur LE writer figuring it out as I went.

 

[YmaOHyd]

That's definitely odd. You'd think once he realized this problem he'd have just changed the whole story to third person.

I'm confronting this a little in something I'm writing. I have a very specific POV character. But sometimes I want the reader to have background that she doesn't need to have and can't really know. It's very tempting to jump out into the third person for a section to get that background down, but I'm trying to resist.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm confronting this a little in something I'm writing. I have a very specific POV character. But sometimes I want the reader to have background that she doesn't need to have and can't really know. It's very tempting to jump out into the third person for a section to get that background down, but I'm trying to resist.

Use close third to solve this issue. You have the freedom of the narrator, but can get right into the mind of the protagonist. It's easily as good as first person for intimacy, engagement, and so on.

 

[TheLobster]

I've written halfway through my 30k-word Summer Lovin entry this year before I realized I've done it not only to the PoV male character, but also to the FMC and every other episodic character appearing in the story. I found this amusing enough that I had to try if I could finish the story without ever naming anyone.

And it actually worked. It certainly helped that the plot makes anyone other than MMC and FMC very peripheral, so "he" and "she" is almost always unambiguous. Other characters, in those rare cases when it's needed, are referred to using monikers invented by the PoV character.

But that's just a 30k-word novella with very limited scope. I find it hard to imagine an entire novel written like this, especially one about global alien invasion.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

In Fight Club the narrator remains largely unnamed. Invisible Monsters has one that uses different aliases. Those are examples similar to what you mentioned, so I don't find it odd. However, I do find odd that John Katzenbach went for a full pacifist run with Red 1-2-3. There are no kills in that book whatsoever, but he did a writer villain, and had him and his wife completely unnamed for some reason? I mean, he was obviously reimagining Little Red Riding Hood, but villains only known by their nicknames rather than their actual names was very unusual for him. Still, I've been doing that since long before I read that book.

I don't find it odd to have characters named with words rather than proper names. I've been doing that since Hotline Miami released, and all characters are named after a characteristic or a role they have instead of having a proper name. Nonetheless I get why would anybody find it odd, regardless if they know the influence or not. To me, stories like The Woman at the Speakeasy work with anonymous characters. Nameless characters; the type that would only be referred with pronouns, are also a thing that I did. In fact, for 337/365, I had a couple that I just had the narrator refer to them as either he or she, depending on who was acting. The simplicity made the story go faster, and also upped the stakes because there was a lot of violent tension in there, like I really took my neon-noir pills for that.

I've also been going one step further with anonymous narrators this year, and I removed the gender out of them. Already got an idea of the how following a few examples authors here gave me (again, thank you all), and I have been practicing it. Several of my entries from the challenge I'm just less than 30 days to finish as of now have that type of narrator, and one story I plan to publish next year has it. I didn't remember it had it though; I decided to upcycle that story because it was a scene that I planned to use on any other long project, but I never managed to fit it anywhere, so I picked it up as its own thing. My NaNo also featured this narrator, and it ended up as probably the most surreal work I've done so far, the most challenging one to draft, and also the most emotionally intense, though I blame that on the themes and the emotions I managed to trigger rather than the narrator itself. All characters in that novel are also anonymous. No one has a given name.

 

[THBGato]

So I'm about halfway through an audio version of the H.G. Wells classic "War Of The Worlds" when it occurred to me that the 1st person narrator has never once been referred to by name, not by himself or by other characters.

We never know the name of the narrator of Atwood's "A handmaid's tale" or Murakami's "Sputnik sweetheart" (who also never mentions the name of his girlfriend). Then you've got Curley's wife in Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men". These are all very deliberate authorial choices meant, I think, to either invite the reader to imagine themselves as the narrator in the first two cases, or to force us to keep our emotional distance in the latter one.

Personally, I can see the point if you want to create an everyman/everywoman narrator. It would work better for some genres than others though.

 

[StillStunned]

I wrote a WIWAW about the nameless and faceless narrator (WIWAW: Nameless and Faceless). One of the arguments is that it works best when the narrator is just a vehicle for the reader to experience the events of the story.

The point of these stories is that they're told from the perspective of someone whose interest is entirely on the other person. That's where the reader's focus should be too. The narrator isn't interesting: they're just a vessel to carry the story.

(...)

[About stories where the 1P POV narrator is fleshed out and has a name:] And this is where these stories differ from the other first-person stories. They're about the narrator's inner journey, rather than simply an experience. I'm not inviting the reader to self-insert, because I'm not writing about the reader's journey. If they identify with my characters, that's wonderful, but then it will be because of some aspect of personality that resonates with them.

With a "faceless" narrator, on the other hand, the emphasis is all on the exterior. What the character does, and the beautiful, sexy people they do it with. There's emotion involved, because I like my characters to feel some sort of connection, but no journey, no profound development.

These stories describe a moment, an event, something the reader can imagine themselves experiencing. The narrator is a nameless and faceless shell, a vehicle for the reader to step into and inhabit. They share the fantasy with a sense of immediacy, because for a brief moment they are living it.

 

[sirhugs]

Both. Mostly the books are all in first or all in third, but there are a few in first where he'll switch to third to tell the audience something Reacher doesn't know yet. So there are first-person books, third-person books and first-person books that switch to third to tell you something Lee Child needs the reader to know but can't figure out how to convey -- his words, not mine:

But we shouldn't take our cues from an author who sold his soul to allow teeny tiny Tom Cruise to play a character who in the books is 6' 8". I have boycott the books since. Not that i imagine that sends any sort of message. I just can't believe that I won't completely be jarred out of the story by this inconsistency.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Ive written a few short stories where I chose not to name my narrator, but I find it an odd, interesting choice to write an entire novel without ever once naming the main character.

There are other characters that do not receive names either.

I did a few entire stories with no names at all.

 

[Djmac1031]

These are all very deliberate authorial choices

just to be clear, (and I don't think you or anyone else has accused me of this), Im not saying its a wrong or bad choice. Just... intriguing.

In War Of The Worlds case, I can see it as a choice to allow the reader to insert themselves as the narrator. Although it often also reads more like a nameless news reporter recounting events after the fact.

Not naming the brother I felt an odder choice but again I suppose keeping any personal familiarity out of it again lets the reader self insert.

Obviously the book is a classic, and was done in a way that allowed readers to accept / forgive the choice, so it worked.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Both. Mostly the books are all in first or all in third, but there are a few in first where he'll switch to third to tell the audience something Reacher doesn't know yet. So there are first-person books, third-person books and first-person books that switch to third to tell you something Lee Child needs the reader to know but can't figure out how to convey -- his words, not mine:

In the Vlad Taltos stories, Steven Brust has Vlad telling the story in first person past, so the Vlad telling the story always knows how things will turn out. He's an enormous Roger Zelazny fan, one suspects that he got this conceit from the Amber series. (The identity of the audience for Corwin's tale is a key plot revelation.)

--Rocco

 

[AG31]

The Jack Reacher books are sometimes in first person and sometimes in third.

Glad you brought up Reacher. I just finished a book and spent as much time (happily) analyzing the writing as I did enjoying the story. I wasn't going to post about it here, because I'm not sure what he does is "odd," but maybe someone can tell me if the style has a name.

The narrator spends a lot of time describing the bare physical details of Reacher's surroundings. He doesn't explicitly say Reacher was examining his surroundings, but it certainly reflects Reacher's attitude toward his world. I'm not sure it qualifies as "close 3rd person." (I just got my head around that phrase recently).

 

[AG31]

The Jack Reacher books are sometimes in first person and sometimes in third.

I hadn't noticed this myself, but do you think it might have to do with recent books' being written by Lee Child and his brother, Andrew?

 

[YmaOHyd]

I hadn't noticed this myself, but do you think it might have to do with recent books' being written by Lee Child and his brother, Andrew?

No, it predates that. I believe the choice is determined by whether he feels he can tell the story without having the villains appear on the page until the hero encounters them. He can in KILLING FLOOR. He can't in BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE.

 

[AG31]

No, it predates that. I believe the choice is determined by whether he feels he can tell the story without having the villains appear on the page until the hero encounters them. He can in KILLING FLOOR. He can't in BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE.

In the most recent one he has sections for villains and sections for good guys. All in 3rd person, but I've seen this technique (not sure by Child) where the good guy is 1st person and the villain sections are 3rd, and it seems to work well.

 

[crookedletter]

I heard there's a guy around here who likes to write in second person.

In general, I only find a writing choice "odd" if the writer doesn't pull it off. I like a unique approach, I like to see writers trying new things. If it's jarring in the reading and trips you up, makes you wonder why the writer made that choice, then I think something is missing in the execution.

The most recent example I can think of is FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven. It's a horror novel set in an amusement park isolated by a storm, the workers stuck there going full Lord of the Flies. It's an interesting premise, it has some really cool horror elements.

But it's written as testimonials after the fact, as part of a journalistic project to uncover what really went on. Not on its own necessarily a bad approach, it can be pulled off. But the way it's executed, the effect, to me, was to lose all immersion and suspense in the story. Each section reads like a story some dude might be telling me over a beer, and the tension is weakened by the conversational tone and the fact that you know the speaker has made it through whatever ordeal they're describing.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Owen Wister's The Virginian has a nameless narrator who is omnipresent throughout the story, even when it is obvious he isn't part of what's happening. The Virginian is considered the first non-pulp or dime novel of the genre. But I think James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales is a Western, just taking place when the West wasn't all that westward.

So I'm about halfway through an audio version of the H.G. Wells classic "War Of The Worlds" when it occurred to me that the 1st person narrator has never once been referred to by name, not by himself or by other characters.

Wells takes it a step farther when at one point, the narrator begins to recount the adventures of "my brother" who, again, is never referred to by name.

The story still works quite well, and so far there was only one spot where things got confusing when the brother gets into a tussle with three other unnamed men. Lots of "he" and "him" floating around and it was tough to follow who was doing what to whom.

Ive written a few short stories where I chose not to name my narrator, but I find it an odd, interesting choice to write an entire novel without ever once naming the main character.

There are other characters that do not receive names either. The narrator spends some time with a character only referred to as "the curate," and the brother meets two women in his travels that he takes up with. While one is named, the other is referred to only as the "sister in law."

Got me thinking about other odd choices in writing, whether it be classic or modern literature, or our own stories.

 

[Djmac1031]

In general, I only find a writing choice "odd" if the writer doesn't pull it off.

Perhaps "odd" wasn't the best word choice, and obviously in my example Wells pulled it off.

And again I wanna stress i don't think it was a bad move either. Not that my opinion matters on a book considered by most a literary classic.

I've read it before but its been a very long time, and now that i actually write my own stories the choice to not name the narrator jumped out at me more than it might have my first reading.

 

[crookedletter]

Perhaps "odd" wasn't the best word choice, and obviously in my example Wells pulled it off.

And again I wanna stress i don't think it was a bad move either. Not that my opinion matters on a book considered by most a literary classic.

I've read it before but its been a very long time, and now that i actually write my own stories the choice to not name the narrator jumped out at me more than it might have my first reading.

Fair. And whether or not it trips you up as a reader, you might notice things like that more as a writer. Or, at least... you should.