As we work through our drafts, the question of who’s the narrator and what point of view (POV) should I choose arises. Frederik Reiken suggests in his essay, The Author-Narrator-Merge, Why Many First-Time Novelists Wind up with Flat, Uninteresting Protagonists, that in the writer’s mind there ought to be a distinct separation of author, narrator, and character, he writes:
“[…] we must be able to delineate instinctively between the three domains of author, narrator, and character, which is not as simple as it sounds. For one thing, we often mistake the narrator or even the character for the author. Strictly speaking, an author is a human being who exists outside the novel’s textual universe. (Under this strict definition, the same would hold true even in the case of nonfiction memoir.) The author is, of course, the book’s prime mover, but as a biological creature, the author can never physically enter the textual dimension and hence is limited to a presence that depends on the level of symbolic correspondence between the author and his or her textual components–the narrator(s) and character(s). Some theorists have even claimed that a novel’s power rests with the paradox that an author asserts his or her presence through a form of absence. Meanwhile the narrator, strictly speaking, is a construct of language, invented for the purpose of both presenting and translating the novel’s action such that a reader can stay oriented with the narrative’s sentence-by-sentence flow. Every thought, gesture, or action-indeed, every absence of thought, gesture, or action falls under the narrator’s jurisdiction […]
I wondered if and how Laskar consciously navigated this separation. Laskar explained that in Bengali culture, people address each other with a title in an ordinal rank. Laskar made a choice to illustrate the protagonist’s feeling of invisibility by consciously leaving out the Mother’s name while at the same time paying homage to Bengali culture. “I wanted to make a point that these people are invisible.” She says. Without spoiling the story, Laskar gives readers a nod by alluding to the meaning of Mother’s name. She continues, “Grace Paley once said, we are supposed to write what we don’t know about what we know. Then we get to explore.” Laskar applied this notion to her protagonist and “gave” her something familiar as a starting point (Laskar’s three kids and her dog).
“But the only real thing in this book is my dog.” She says, “Her name was Greta, a German Shepherd, every little story about her in this book is true; everything else is made up. I think I really wrote the book for her because she’s not here anymore. She was a central figure in my life during the 2000s. Greta, was my place of familiarity, my starting point. It gave me the freedom to separate and fictionalize the rest.”
In the next post, I will share with you how Devi gains access to the interior lives of her characters and how she creates authenticity on the page.
