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96 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
almost nothing about Jenkins’s own inner life – even major events such as his
wife’s miscarriage are only revealed in conversation with the other characters.
This device enables the narrator to comment on and interpret events, while
keeping the focus clearly on the other characters rather than himself.
Write a story told by a narrator who heard about the main events from another
person. Think about how the events may have become distorted in the telling.
Begin the narrative, ‘Many years later, I was told what had really happened that
day long ago when . . . ’
Seeing everything with an omniscient narrator
The omniscient (all-knowing) narrator is the traditional 19th-century style of
writing a narrative. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and
Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) are good examples. The author is
the narrator and knows everything about all the characters: what they think
and feel, what happened to them in the past, and what will happen to them
in the future. This kind of narrative may be highly suitable for large historical
epics, sagas and long novels with many characters, and it does offer the
writer a huge amount of flexibility, but the problem is that it can seem too
distant.
The omniscient narrator as a disembodied being who looks down from above
and controls everything is now rather outmoded in literature. Today, writers
tend to avoid dealing in absolute truth, but instead prefer to accept that
different people have different subjective views, and so they try to be more
pluralistic in their approach.
Many contemporary writers have found a way of personifying their omniscient
narrators. In his 2005 novel The Book Thief, now also a film, Markus Zusak
made death into a character in the novel – death, of course, is omniscient. In
The Lovely Bones (2002), also filmed, Alice Sebold kills off her main character
at the end of the first chapter – she’s then looking down from heaven and
observing everything that happens to the other characters in the novel.
If you’re writing an omniscient narrative, modern readers almost certainly need
to know who that narrator is: perhaps a character in the future writing about
what happened in the past, a self-conscious author writing the story, a history
professor or a god-like or alien being. The identity doesn’t matter as long as
you give some explanation as to why the narrator knows what he knows.
Although the omniscient narrator can go into the heads of all the characters,
in practice most narratives restrict this to only a few of the main characters.
Readers have difficulty identifying closely with more than a handful of significant
characters.