“I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Viewpoint in the Story
by Amber Duivenvoorden
Moffett and McElheny posit that ‘what a short story is about, is partly a question of how it is told’. It is the story’s form that expresses the author’s intention, the meaning ‘beneath the content’. Depending on its viewpoint for instance, a story could have another interpretation, the story of Wuthering Heights would be entirely different if told from the perspective of Heathcliff, rather than from Earnshaw’s and Nelly Dean’s. For instance, it is from Nelly Dean that we learn that Heathcliff had been listening to Cathy’s speech about Linton’s proposal and that he had only heard
‘Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, and then stayed to hear no further’.
If the reader had been given Heathcliff’s perspective, then they might have been allowed to see a vulnerability in him which would have allowed them to empathize with his pain and loss. Instead the reader only knows that he leaves Wuthering Heights and that because of his swift departure,
“Catherine would not be persuaded into tranquility. She kept wandering to and fro, from the gate to the door, in a state of agitation” and then went outside in the storm, ‘calling at intervals, and then listening, and then crying outright’.
The reader is also kept in the dark regarding Heathcliff’s life away from Wuthering Heights and the truth around acquiring his fortune. A detailed account of his personal tribulations would have given more insight into his character and into why he came back so resolute in getting revenge and in wrecking the lives of the people he grew up with. Instead, the reader can only wonder at Heathcliff’s character and where he truly came from, what he felt and what happened to him in the intervening years.
Would Heathcliff have married if he had his say?
When I first started writing short stories, I used the most common viewpoint, which Moffett and McElheny term the ‘Anonymous Narration’, a ‘single character point of view’. It is possibly one of the most common techniques because it allows the author to write both the ‘inside and outside views of a protagonist’, without having to account for how they know this information. The ‘hidden narrator’, apart from revealing what the protagonist feels and thinks, might also be subtly commenting on ‘the material’. Throughout Ann Petry’s “Doby’s Gone”, we are presented with Sue’s thoughts and feelings, how when attacked by the group of children because of her skin colour, ‘she wanted to go home where it was safe and quiet and where her mother would hold her tight in her arms’. However, although Ann Petry’s “Doby’s Gone” is solely from Sue’s point of view, the reader also gets to know that ‘Doby wasn’t real. He existed only in Sue’s mind. He had been created out of her need for a friend of her own age- her own size’ and that her mother ‘had hoped that Doby would vanish long before Sue entered school in the fall’.
The dual character point of view
On the other hand, the ‘dual character point of view’, which presents the ‘inner life’ of two characters, is not so commonly used, since time and space are limited in the short story. Usually through this type of viewpoint, one character dominates the narrative ‘but is illuminated by being perceived for a while through another character’. This is the case in Alice Walker’s ‘Strong Horse Tea’, in which we see everything through the perspective of Rannie Toomer, an unmarried mother whose child is dying. We briefly get the outlook of a mailman whom Rannie asks for help and it is through his perspective that Rannie’s desperation truly comes across.
She ‘sticks her head dripping inside his car’ while ‘’he recoils from her breath and gives little attention to what she is saying about her sick baby as he mops up the water she drips on the plastic door handle of the car’’.
At the end he leaves quickly, ‘cringing from the thought that she had put her hands on him’.
On the other hand, in T.C. Boyle’s “Sinking House”, the dual points of view are given equal time and are alternated since both Meg and Muriel are protagonists and the story is about the play-off between their viewpoints. Although the two seem to have an antagonistic relationship, since Muriel causes damage to Meg’s house by letting all the taps in her house run after her husband’s death, by the end of the story, they both seem to recognize kindred spirits in each other. For Meg, this happens when she thinks of herself as an elderly widow who would “probably forget to turn off the sprinklers too” and in Muriel when she first sees Meg at the door, and notices the woman’s darkened eye-makeup and ‘thinks she recognizes her from a TV program about a streetwalker who rises up to kill her pimp and liberate all the other leather-clad, black-eyed streetwalkers of the neighbourhood”. The latter is a powerful image because in a sense the streetwalker represents both Meg and Muriel who have also been dominated and disrespected by the men in their lives and are to an extent united by their abuse. The dual narrative here seeks to solidify a sense of kinship and understanding between the two, particularly at the end when the officers escort Muriel out of her house and the two protagonists make eye-contact. To Meg’s surprise, Muriel’s look isn’t ‘vengeful at all, it’s just sad. It is a look that says this is what it comes to. Fifty years and this is what it comes to’.
The detached autobiography
A common viewpoint I enjoy using is the ‘detached autobiography’. The narrators here are the main characters too, but their understanding of the situation they recount is much different to what it was when they experienced it. This viewpoint provides a reliable narrator and is usually about the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist. In Frank O’Connor’s “First Confession", Jackie narrates his childhood impressions of his grandmother whom he loathed for being ‘a real old countrywoman and quite unsuited to the life in town’ and the priest whom he felt ‘was the most entertaining character he’d ever met in the religious line’ after Jackie confesses his violent tendencies towards his sister and grandma. However, the hypocrisy of the priest comes across when he approves of Jackie’s violence , claiming that ‘someone will go for his sister with a bread knife one day and he won’t miss her’. Jackie leaves the confession believing that his sins are moral and acceptable, however the reader knows, as does the older Jackie narrating the story that the confession should have made him understand his own sin and hypocrisy, when in fact it had the opposite effect, his behaviour no longer seems too bad. In this way, the ‘detached autobiography’, works to highlight the narrative’s cynical stance on Catholicism as a corrupt institution.
The memoir or observer narration
A less common viewpoint is ‘memoir or observer narration’. This kind of narration, a story about a ‘third person’, is told through the eyes of the ‘first person’. The narrator is one who knows the story of the people they are writing about and ‘<resonates> with it to the point of mystifying their heroes.’ Having read John Cheever’s “Reunion”, a story in which a son is completely eclipsed by his father’s overbearing nature, I wanted to have a narration which demonstrated the different relationship ‘an observer narrator may have to events and to main characters’, especially ones they were close to and admired in some way. In one of my stories, entitled “The Birthday”, the niece talks mostly about her aunt; when they walk up the street, she wants ‘everyone to see us, her in her leather jacket and pleated skirt, her head held up, shoulders straight like they told us at school, and me, walking beside her, at her pace, holding her hand’. Thus this story is so focused on the girl’s adoration for her aunt that she herself becomes a secondary character and although it is her birthday, the whole day is about the aunt. This is the same in Cheever’s story; the morning spent with his dad is not about their reunion but about his father showing off his superiority.
The Dramatic Monologue
Finally, another viewpoint I enjoy using is the ‘Dramatic Monologue’. Through this viewpoint, the ‘monologuist’ has a motive for telling the story and the audience is specific. The speech is natural and the reader can discern who the speaker is, solely from ‘references within the monologue itself’. Reading Joyce Carol Oates’ “… & Answers”, in which a mother talks to a psychiatrist about an accident she had which resulted in the death of her daughter, I became interested in experimenting with the spontaneity that the viewpoint offers and also the speaker’s unreliability. Since the narrators in all of my stories are reliable ones, I wanted a bit of variation. One of my stories, entitled “Dear Mother” is similar to “… & Answers”, in that the speaker talks about himself and he is also questioned by a psychiatrist. However, my speaker’s monologue is directed at his mother, to whom he reveals his day at the ward and his current life, all the time avoiding the real question; what did he do to end up in the asylum and what made him do it? In Oates’ story, the speaker does talk about the accident and losing her daughter, despite her constantly repeating that she doesn’t really remember. The ‘art’ of this kind of monologue is that the listener’s responses are reflected in the speaker’s thoughts. The mother in Oates’ story repeats the questions asked by the psychiatrist and answers them in return while the man in my story assumes what his mother wants to know about him, that she must be ‘wondering how he keeps himself entertained’ and goes on to tell her.
Ultimately, the short story illustrates perfectly how you ‘cannot separate the tale from the telling’, the author chooses point of view according to meaning and according to the amount of intimacy they wish to portray in the narrative. Although the strength of the short story does lie in the viewpoint, it is in this domain that the novel has real advantage over the short story, since the former’s length and space allows for the experimentation of different voices within a storyline in a way that the latter’s cannot.
About Amber Duivenvoorden
Alice Walker, “Strong Horse Tea” in In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. 49.
About Amber Duivenvoorden
My name is Amber Duivenvoorden. I am a first year PhD student in Creative Writing from Malta. I am doing my PhD at Bath Spa University and am writing a collection of short stories set in Malta. In my research I am investigating how the outcast developed from the 1950s to contemporary times in relation to colonialism and the effect that the latter had, and continues to have on society’s perception of the outcast. My short story ‘The Prickly Pears’ was shortlisted and published in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 2017 and another story, ‘Amazing Grace’, was published in Antae Journal, issued by the University of Malta. My short story ‘The Kingdom’ was also longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018.
Hope you enjoyed this week's stimulating read
References
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (London ; New York :Penguin Books, 2003), p.50
John Cheever, “Reunion” in The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Vintage, 2006)
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Sinking House” in If the River Was Whiskey (USA: Viking Penguin, 1989), p. 103.
James Moffett and Kenneth R. Mc Elheny, Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories (New York: Penguin Group, 1995), p. 587.
Frank O’Connor, “First Confession” in The Stories of Frank O’Connor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), p. 59.
Ann Petry, “Doby’s Gone”, in Miss Muriel and Other Stories (New York: Russell &
Volkening, 1971), p. 80.
Alice Walker, “Strong Horse Tea” in In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. 49.
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