Says Who?

point of view--the character or characters in a story through whose eyes and other senses the reader learns and intuits the dramatic action; the teller of the tale; the biased, human filter through which the dramatic information is transmitted.

The writer achieves a significant part of willing suspension of belief from the reader when dramatic forces cause the reader to forget that the story is emerging directly from the writer and that, in fact, the story is pure artifice. This WSOB is well achieved by artful introduction of one or more characters who are telling the story, ASAP. As in:

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

The first sentence would actually fit as a Twitter entry. The second sentence pretty well nails the character and his point of view in place, where it remains, a resoundingly successful example of a writer assuming a persona and that individual's traits and experiences in order to relate the details of his encounters variously with his snarky sister, her jewel of a man-for-husband, with an escaped convict, a cantankerous old lady, and a spoiled-if-beguiling young woman named Estella. So gifted a public speaker was Pip's creator that he could have chosen to tell the story of Great Expectations in his own voice. You could profit from asking yourself why he did not, then consider your answer.

There is often some practical reason for a particular character or set of characters having been chosen to narrate a story, sometimes as simplistic as Ahab's case in his selection to be narrator of Moby-Dick; he was the only one who survived the events of the novel. Mr. Stephens was chosen to narrate The Remains of the Day because of his resume as head butler, but also because of his not getting 'it," which is to say because of his naivete. Thus was the writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, constrained to keep Stevens's naivete in mind at all times and to constantly be aware of the need to render it plausibly.

Who is telling your story, and why?

Benjy Compson was chosen to narrate a portion of The Sound and the Fury because the wiring of his intellectual and reasoning processes were some degrees away from the intellectual and emotional outlook of other POV characters. No doubt about it, at some point during his writing of the story, William Faulkner recalled the Shakespearean line from Macbeth"...it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." But Faulkner new the need to have larger fish to fry than the mere perception of Benjy as an idiot; Faulkner wished the reader to compare Benjy's vision of reality with that of the other characters in the novel. Benjy is then by no means a case of a writer thinking, Aha, I'll tell a story from the point of view of an idiot. The novel is a complex comparison of attitudes, sensitivities, and behavior in which Benjy emerges as an ironic symbol of the most admirable sort.

Once again, why have you selected a particular person or combination of persons to relate your narrative? What effect will your choice have on the other characters? What effect will your choice have on the reader?

I'll See Your Happy Ending and Raise You a Downer

happy ending, the--an outcome of a story or novel in which one of more of the lead characters is successful in achieving a goal; a payoff or result of a narrative in which the behavior of the protagonist leads the reader to feel optimistic; characters getting what they want without having to overpay.

One could almost paraphrase Tolstoy with the observation that happy endings are all alike, then qualify that observation with the added observation that the happy ending is the one where most of the characters achieve some measure of success after having competed for it. One could also consider the number of such endings that were dictated by publishers after having read the original endings produced first by their authors. Charles Dickens, who knew his way around endings, comes to mind with his original ending to arguably his most superbly realized novel, Great Expectations. Dickens's publisher was not happy with the ending, asked for, and got an alternate where things produced a greater glow of home, but at what cost?

In some noteworthy cases, publication seems to depend on the trope of the greater good rather that what works for a single character. The ending, which is to say the payoff of Lolita had to have a justice-is-served ending because the stakes were--and still are--so high. Conventional morality wants Humbert Humbert to have suffered more than he already has. Conventional morality wants to forget that Dolores-Dolly-Lolita might have been sophisticated and aware enough to have read Humbert and his intentions and, accordingly, to have "been there" for him.

Two notably happy endings that bear heavy irony are found in Huckleberry Finn and Catch-22; each novel ending with the protagonist fleeing from a decidedly impossible situation. Both these happy endings deserve consideration and study. Each one has the protagonist faced with an untenable fate. As readers, we join them in that escape and consequently experience the happiness of the ending. Humbert Humbert is in a no-win situation. Even if he'd been able to ride off into the sunset with Dolores, we know she'd probably have grown tired of him soon enough and, indeed, he would have grown tired of her because she was already on the verge of outgrowing his range of interest.

As in other relevant matters, the writer must be the arbiter of what constitutes the happiness part of the happy ending trope. The better way to look at the happy ending is to see it as a "justice served" moment, when the time has come to cash in the characters' and the author's chips for dramatic currency.

Annie Proulx's short story, "Brokeback Mountain," written to expose what she felt was the resident homophobia of most rural areas, can hardly be said to have a happy ending, but given the characters and the author's stake in it, the payoff of the story speaks to the issue of justice and the double standard in its service.

Happy endings and sad endings are opening hands in the metaphoric poker game of the contemporary story; the true ending, the literary ending, comes with the reflection on the fate of the characters involved as it is measured against justice, served or not served.

Bildungsroman, Crucible, and Not to Forget Episode

bildungsroman--a novel about the growing-up process of a young person, seeking admission into the hallowed chambers of adulthood and supposed maturity; a youthful journey through painful experiences and idealism to a more pragmatic awareness of conventional behavior and ethics, often rendered in first person, autobiographical point of view, such as Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Augie March, but equally effective in third person, with he or she narrators, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Member of the Wedding.

Although some writers have deliberately set forth to write a bildungsroman, most have done so through the simple expedient of choosing an interesting, talented, or energetic young person as a protagonist (See Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis.), then following an arc if not the entirety of that person's life. Accordingly, some scholars, critics, and reviewers will call such a novel a bildungsroman. If said bildungsroman appears to be a cautionary tale or one with a strong dose of moral choice, then said scholars, critics and reviewers will be showing off their knowledge of the original intent of bildungsroman, which was to give young readers a means of measuring their own goals, behavior, and responses against some topical paradigm.

One American author, Horatio Alger, Jr., Americanized the Germanic construct to "rags to riches" in a series of inspirational and hortatory novels, a hobby horse he rode to fame well beyond his death in 1899, inspiring generations of young men to work their way to the top. All these many Horatio Alger stories could be thought of as bildungsromen.

Writers do themselves no good when they allow themselves to be reined in by a catch-all term or concept, regardless of how conventional the concept has become, nor how trendy and accepted it is. Stories of young men and women coming of age for a two-sided target, one for authors, the other for readers.


crucible--a scene or series of scenes in a narrative in which plot and character elements collide, intensify, and boil over to point of dramatic consequences; the narrative sense of increasing tension, building toward pressure; a bowl- or cup-shaped laboratory container, designed to heat chemical compounds to extreme temperatures. Hence the useful metaphor for the writer of a scene as a container of volatile elements to which the heat of dramatic pressure has been applied. To extend the metaphor from the physics of chemistry to the dynamics of drama, the notion of the crucible extends to the results of the heat hurrying along the inevitable change that is a part of story.


episode--a dramatic incident or event that is part of a larger work; scenes involving characters with whom the reader is familiar, being moved to activity if not action by accelerating circumstances of a plot design; a separate segment of a published work. The writer is most often likely to hear the word used about a particular work as an indication that the tail is wagging the dog--the incidents and moments are distracting the reader from the story. A work thought to be episodic is by not necessarily lacking suspense or other vital elements of drama, instead the work is seen as lacking the force of causality.

In a well-constructed story, characters behave as they do because the circumstances of their agenda and of the plot force them to do so or offer them unanticipated opportunities to do so, thus the sense of the presence of causality. Episodic narratives may be big on activity and movement but they emerge as not being relevant to the main force of the story. Think determinism, a concept that everything that happens is the antithesis of free will and is in fact the result of previous events. Stories are if not entirely deterministic, well guided by the principle of determinism. Think law in the sense of precedent-setting cases informing the rendering of new decisions; called stare decisis among legal scholars, their judicial reach for determinism is visible. No episodes for them.

4

denouement--the stage in a story directly before the resolution begins; moments in a story when the protagonist appears to be overwhelmed by conditions and forces contrary to the main goal and relevant interests; the equivalent point in a prose narrative of the end of act two in the three-act play format.

The denouement is the critical zenith in a story where the outcome is uncertain, although the clues and prompts leading to its resolution have been set into the narrative. Taking the Latin and French origins of the word into consideration, denouement is literally the unknotting of complications and obstacles. Now removed or ameliorated to sufficient degree, the ending can be set in place. The next questions become, will the resolution please the characters and if so, how do they show it?

Denouement in novels is more detailed than the resolution of a short story; there is more at stake in a novel and some change in attitude, fortune, and world view are often considered necessities by readers. For better or worse, Charles Dickens felt the need to return to his memorable novel, Great Expectations, changing the attitudes and worldviews of two of the major characters.


edge--a feeling of resentment, impatience, or frustration resident within a character, causing that individual to respond accordingly and in unconventional ways; a resident nature inherent in a character that seems to nudge or shove that character into action; a notable impatience with the status quo. Edgy characters are not necessarily negative, merely wanting to do something about a circumstance, condition, or situation. The presence of edge in a character is an implicit promise of heightened responses and activity to the reader and to other characters.

Wizard of Oz, The--an ideal narrative to examine for its thoughtful inclusion of basic elements supportive of story integrity. There is never any doubt of the answer to the question, Whose story is it? (Dorothy Gale) There is no doubt about the goal or prize of the story. (For Dorothy to return home.) The obstacles are laid out carefully before Dorothy, and the discovery she makes (the Wizard is a good-natured humbug) is a learning experience, as is the awareness, There's no place like home.

characters--the individuals in dramatic narratives about whom the story revolves; persons who by their actions and responses to events drive the story beyond its point of engagement, toward a resolution.

Front-rank characters are protagonists, those who cause things to happen; and antagonists, those whose agendas collide with and oppose the protagonists. Messenger characters are those who bring information on stage, anything from "The red coats are coming," to a "Guess who the high school hunk has a crush on." Pivotal characters are present as backup and support for the protagonists and antagonists, possibly switching sides during the course of the story. Exemplary characters appear to have things happen to them that serve as warnings or examples to the protagonists and antagonists. In a teen-aged romance, an exemplary character becomes pregnant and serves as a warning to the protagonist. In a mystery novel, an individual from the same organization as a front-rank character is found murdered, making the front-rant character fear now for his life.

Characters at all levels come on stage with some degree of expectation, which will effect the agenda and vocabulary the writer uses in dealing with the character, the way the character speaks and behaves. Even the lowest-level walk on has some agenda, even if it is just to get home. All characters come on stage having just been where they were previously, imparting a history of behavior and, thus, a greater reality to the reader and to the other characters. Accordingly, shadow characters are those whom the writer needs merely to open a door, clean a room, deliver a pizza, or get a signature for a package. The shadow character may be on stage for a matter of seconds, but may come to visible life with the difference in a verb.

All characters have some features, the front-rank characters having the biggest tool kit. Important hint: giving any character too many details, whether descriptive or motivational, signals the reader to expect a greater role from that character. Thus the details for each character should be thought out during revision, then managed carefully.

Three Ways of Looking at a Character

first person--a form of dramatic narrative in which an individual using the pronoun I becomes the filter through whom the events of the drama are filtered; not necessarily Adam, as implied in some texts, but rather a presence who becomes the author's appointed agent to relate the details of a fictional history. The first person narrative became popular at a time when it was believed that the narrator was relating actual events in actual settings, a belief that resurfaced during the middle years of the twentieth century when a confession-romance literature of I-narratives found massmarket magazine audiences.

The first person narrator may play a direct role in the story being related, in which case he or she becomes the individual in whom the reader invests emotional and psychological capital, a notable example being the eponymous narrator of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The first person narrator may also play an ancillary role in the story such as Nick Caraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a presence used to good example by the author as it became apparent that Caraway was being exploited by the major focus, Gatsby.

As with all other points of view, the writer must endow the first person narrator with enough quirks, obstacles, relevant background, and goals to provide a distinct personality, including but not limited to vocabulary, a place on the optimism/pessimism scale, prejudices and antipathies, and a history with some relevance to the story at hand.

Having constructed the platform of attitudes and goals for the first person narrator, the writer must then quantify a place for the character on the naive scale, in which the writer assesses how relatively naive or realistic the character is. The naive narrator does not see individuals and events the same way as cynical or realistic narrators might, thus does interpretation become an important factor in the forces driving the first person narrator.

One of the stated technical disadvantages for having a first person narrator is the need for that individual to appear in every scene in order to be able with plausibility to relate the scene to the reader. With a little thought, the writer will quickly see through this limitation by, for example, allowing the narrator to be "off stage" at a particular event, the hear the details of the event from one or more other characters. This limitation may also extend well into the past by having the first person narrator encounter diaries journals, or newspaper accounts of an event that took place earlier. A greater technical obstacle still apparent is the overuse of the pronoun I, which stands just a tad more virulent than obvious and ungainly locutions used to avoid the obvious repetitions of the I.

Two splendid examples of first person narrative are Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, each of which has survived the Still Readable and Inspiring After A Hundred Years in Print test, and one of the most enduring first person narratives, "Call me Ishmael," had to have bee written in first person because Ishmael was the only survivor of the ill-fated Pequod.

About the appropriateness of first person narrative, critics, editors, and teachers are divided; it is an idiosyncratic call best answered by listening to the characters, who should have a hand in the decision of their being rendered as I or he or she. The true test to be applied to a character is the plausibility that character presents to the reader.


synecdoche--a figure of speech that is first-cousin to the metaphor, it posits the whole being greater than the sum of its parts or the parts representing the whole, or the parts of one thing relating to the whole or parts of another thing. A gifted surgeon, for example, may be referred to and represented by her hands. Similarly, there is the synecdochal long arm of the law; a crew, particularly of a ship, being referred to as hands; plastic being used as a symbol for credit cards, which of course obviate the need for carrying around sums of paper, or money. Knowing the synecdoche may result in a higher SAT score and be good for points in a literary criticism course, but it may also have the unwanted effect of becoming an albatross or weight about the neck (or any other part) of a story, so much so that its over abundance will cause editors and readers to defect.

When the subject of metaphorical writing comes up, it should be regarded in the same way as weather reports and landscapes are regarded--with extreme caution. For writers such as Raymond Chandler, they--the metaphors and synecdoches--arrived as appropriate devices that shed shorthand light on a situation, an attitude, a condition, a character--not as a blinking neon sign calling attention to the writer's cleverness. By all means, note and admire them when they are found in the work of other writers, but do not try to get them into your own work through some sense of literary nepotism. If they are to come in your work, they will come of their own, and even then should be subject to critical scrutiny. Do they make things better, or do they in negative synecdoche become the literary equivalent of an energetic kid, showing off in class?


bigger than life--a quality often attributed to characters after the fact of their having been read; a sense of an individual having a combination of traits, qualities, goals, and strategies that make him or her memorable for individuality while at the same time representing a particular type, thus, for example the adjective quixotic as it represents Don Quixote, who left an indelible reference guide on a segment of society. Not to be confused with implausible behavior, the concept of bigger than life reflects a vision of an individual that radiates either a single quality or warring internal qualities. Consider Pat Conroy's bigger than life Lieutenant Bull Meecham, from his novel The Great Santini. By all accounts an argumentative, bigoted, bullying sort, Meecham was a dazzling aviator, a man who metaphorically was king of the clouds, a man who, when the choice unexpectedly fell on him, risked then gave his life to save others, causing readers to feel shock and grief at his death. Another bigger than life character for splendid example is The Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales, a portrait of a woman with attitude, goals, and grace who has remained an out-of-the-ordinary paradigm for five hundred years.

It is possible to track bigger than life individuals from the distant past, when characters were either of noble rank or forged on the field of battle, or in the castle drawing room, or otherworldly, but effective drama now is about remarkable men and women from more modest stations in life, performing in ways that belie the limitations that go with their situations; men and women who sense talents and obligations which they--not being able to afford horses or cars--walk to greatness.

Bigger than life characters are made of the clay of ambition, responsibility, love, devotion, and vision necessary to seek and then effect change. To render them, the writer needs to know who his characters are, what his characters want, what they are willing to endure to get what they want.

Who Goes First?

The first-person narrator haunts the hallways of fiction in the same manner ghosts were alleged to have wandered the battlements, bedchambers, and cellars of old castles, seeking to arrest us with tales, complaints, and sagas of unrequited injustice. Some of us are drawn naturally to the medium, thinking it frees us from our own restraints as an observer and manager of events, while others of us have found ourselves locked in a log jam of the pronoun I, which pops up with the insistence of a grade schooler wanting to show off knowledge of a right answer to a teacher's question.

Many diverse and lovely first-person novels have graced the literature, ranging from the exquisite wrench of Dickens' Great Expectations to the more recent skepticism of the Philip Marlow detective fiction of Raymond Chandler. Within this panoply is one of the more dangerous examples of how a mismanaged first-person can lead the writer to limitless agony. I speak of Huckleberry Finn, an exemplary first-person novel because of the depth and honesty of the chore it took on, and as well because of the emotional journey on which it led his creator. Huckleberry Finn also illustrates my greater point about the first-person narrative.

For most of his written work, Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain trying to be Samuel Clemens. Mark Twain was his discovered voice, his mischievous, irreverent self, champing at the bit to get at pomposity, pretension, sanctimoniousness. At the same time, he yearned for the status of his literary friends, the Howells, the Lowell, even the respect of his friend, the Rev. Joe Twitchell. In short, when Twain got into the first-person self of Huck Finn, he was writing about himself again, himself burnished by hundreds of thousands of words and of that many readers. He'd wrestled with his conscience in print before but never over so deeply as in Huck Finn, where he literally took on the issues of slavery and racial equality. The I, the first-person, was a thirteen-year-old boy, a boy that was created the way a trained actor today would create a role. Twain lived that part until he could no longer put up with it, at which point he shelved it for nearly ten years. Lucky for us but not so lucky for Twain, Huck wouldn't let go, kept pestering at Twain until he made himself heard. This time he brought in Tom Sawyer, who had grown enough to show Twain how a more regular boy would have responded to such an adventure. Tom stuck around to do some reprehensible things, particularly to Jim, the runaway slave. For a while, Huck went along with the teasing because of his admiration for Tom, and what a thesis and or deconstruction that would make--but not for now. For now, the first-person drew Twain into an unintended honesty that was transformative.

The detail about Twain and Huck here is to emphasize the point that the author has to create a character no less extensive in the first-person point of view than in any other, say third or multiple, or even the omniscient. The author has to know or discover the intent of the narrator, then portray it through emotion being evoked in the reader. In the calculus of drama, emotion evoked leads to action; action is the spine of the story.

How does one "prepare" for the first-person point of view? One way is to create a biography of the character, including a map of that character's senses: does she profess vegetarianism for instance, or does she secretly love and want Fred, and if so what are her chances of having her love reciprocated, and if they are in her estimation next to nothing, what does she do as Plan B?

Or to put it another way, the I is not you, but you become the I.

Another way for us to prepare for carrying the story is to ask why this character wants to tell her or his version of the events. We had no such problem with No Country for Old Men because the author decided he was the one to tell it, whereupon he did so by his stunning command and vision of the people involved and how they felt and how they were driven by what they did.

Yet another way to help us see those who would relate their versions is to pick a favored poem. In some ways, I'm a sonnet man, so I'll use as examples two of my favorites, the Shakespeare, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and the Wordsworthian trope, "The world is too much with us, late and soon." Both are readily available on Google. Recite one of these as each of your characters would using that practical exercise to help you "get" the tone and attitude of each.

I is a fine medium--provided you know who I is and who I is not.

Making a Scene

The scene is the basic unit of story. To see this unit properly, visualize a pellucid container, a laboratory retort, a British ale glass, a water glass. Into it are poured such elements as character, landscape, ambition, suspense, reversal, surprise. Others, to be sure. Depends on you and, of course, the story. Depending on the length and intent of the story, a number of containers will be required to accomplish the emotional and intellectual dramatic ambition. The material--if any--between these containers in short stories and novels is a particular form of narrative we'll look at later. This same between-the-containers information in stage plays is called stage directions; in the teleplay and screenplay, this narrative information is director's notes and actor cues.

Starting with the first empty container, we have the introduction of certain dramatic and narrative information. Individuals appear on stage, at the very least bearing some form of expectation or anticipation. They expect something to happen, they are warned of an impending event of consequence, they are already awaiting a particular event--or they are expecting things to go on as they have in the past.

In the opening scene of Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are already present, doing something. Through their conversation, which features the line, "Nothing to be done," we are introduced to one of the major themes of the story, the added fact that they are where they are because they are waiting for a character named Godot, supplemented with visual and verbal information about the personality of each of the two men. We also begin to harbor the suspicion that Godot, whomever he may be, will never arrive, causing us to speculate on our own about who or what Godot really is and what the significance of his non arrival may be.

Speculation is a necessary quality in opening scenes because the moment the reader/viewer begins to speculate, at that moment the reader/viewer is invested in the story, has some stake in its outcome, perhaps even begins to root for the agenda of one character over the agenda of another.

We are pulled immediately into the opening of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations with the information that the first person narrator as a youngster, couldn't pronounce his name, Phillip Pirrip, and so called himself Pip. This confession reminds many of us of our own early difficulties with language and the resulting linguistic train wrecks. In short order, Pip tells us he is an orphan, living with his sister, an overbearing nag. Pip is given to visiting the graves of his parents. Nice kid, we think, starting to feel sorry for him, already imagining a life of humdrum tedium for him. On one particular visit to his parents' tombstones, a growling, horrific man, his leg in a prisoner's chains, grabs him, threatens him, makes demands of him.

Whether it is the play, Waiting for Godot, or the novel Great Expectations, we have been given dramatic information that remains with us in each subsequent scene, information that directly influences our emotional response and reception of the scenes to come. The aggregate effect of the dramatic information is called throughline or story arc.

Beginning and subsequent scenes contain at least the following elements:

Characters
Setting, the locale or landscape in which a scene is set
Beats, or events
Tempo, the pacing with which characters say or perform the beats
Blocking, the positions characters occupy during the course of a scene
Dialogue, what the characters say to one another
Subtext, the result of what characters say as opposed to what they truly feel

Scenes may contain other information relevant to the story, conditions such as reversal of an agenda, the discovery of new information, shifts of allegiance, moral choices to be made, and surprise.

Scenes in short stories are more likely to run in chronological order, but such movement is not a convention to be strictly observed. In longer works, novels, stage or screenplays, the order of scenes may shift from present to past in order to provide backstory. In longer works with multiple points of view, a shift in time or chronology can be useful in provoking a sense of suspense. While shifting focus to another time, character, or both, a part of the reader's mind remains with an unresolved situation that took place earlier.

Wherever it is set, a scene is an arena, making the analogy between scene and lab retort apt. Compounds and substances are put into the retort which is then set on a flame. The elements of a scene are introduced in anticipation of the heat from internal and external circumstances raising the temperature to a combustion point. Scenes are accordingly heated by circumstances to the goal of producing combustion. Persons and circumstances respond to the heat of pressure or opposition or frustration or grief or seduction or some prize being offered. The ultimate goal of any scene is the presence of a recognizable emotion. The dramatic means of achieving the emotion is by applying enough pressure, heat, intensity, or frustration to cause there to be some eruption which disturbs or accelerates the growing momentum that passes from scene to scene.

In Macbeth, the audience gets an early taste of where things are going when, returning home, Macbeth is hailed by the three witches as the forthcoming Thane of Cawdor. Scene by scene, Macbeth buys into the scenario by which he will actually become Cawdor. One important point in the play comes when, seeing King Malcolm being delivered his dinner by a servant, Macbeth begins riffing on the theme of last supper, quickly equating what he is about to do to Malcolm with the martyrdom of Christ. Thus conscience is introduced into the crucible, the heat of conscience is applied, and before our eyes, Macbeth weakens, combusts, cannot go through with his planned murder.

The final scene in a story, novel, or drama is the ultimate combustion, the unthinkable come to pass, its result an emotion that becomes the key signature of the work. Scenes are microcosms of an orchestrated macrocosm, where the whole--the-result--becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The payoff of a scene is the awareness of a snowflake or two, landing on your head. The payoff of the short story, novel, or drama is being hit with a snowball.

To see this analogy come to brilliant life, read Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, where the narrator tells of ducking a snowball thrown at him by a schoolmate. The snowball hits a passing woman, well into pregnancy. As a consequence, she delivers prematurely, causing the narrator a life of guilt and recrimination. It is not merely that Davies was such an accomplished storyteller, his opening scene serves as a role model for scenes and snowballs everywhere.

A Class Act

We are born into a time from which we may try to escape by writing beyond or ahead of our time, which is to say historical writing or science fiction speculative writing. Few readers, fewer critics looks at this as worth any serious notice. Indeed, as we find ourselves writing history or casting into future speculations or fantastic alternate universes, we begin to reflect the politics of our birth time and our present time, perhaps through an unintentional-but-revelatory observation, sometimes in what strikes us as service of the story.

We are born into a locale which we chose to exploit or write ourselves out of by deliberately changing the setting of where our writing takes place. How any of us remain regionalists, how many of us move on toward being cosmopolitan or global? Ho many of us solve the problem by inventing our own otherness, our own place in which to set a narrative? And how many of us are inventive enough to solve the problem through research of making it seem we know with some intimacy a place where we have never in fact actually been?

We are born into a social class from which we attempt escape, as surely as D.H. Lawrence was humiliated by his working class roots. We are born into a social class we attempt to exploit, writing about traditions and schools and values and families. My argument is that this accident of birth is the one that has the most effect on us. We can research the others, interview prime examples, even visit the locale, using our mind's eye to transport us back in time in that place. Coping with the effects of the class into which we were born is another matter. Dickens sensed this in Great Expectations and in many ways provided one of his most splendid examples of a single character who lived on two levels, was influenced by each, and how those consequences actually shaped his destiny.

Jack London was another case in point, Herman Melville another, each experiencing and writing beyond limitations of birth landscape, often with lasting effect, each enhancing his own understanding of class structure and making it possible for readers to experience what it is like to be other than what and how and where one has been born.

F.S. Fitzgerald, born well into the middle class, frequently described him as looking in as if through windows at the rich, and James Agee, having grown up rural and lower middle class in Knoxville, Tennessee, quickly wrote his way out of his origins and place into another, more opulent world.

None of these choices is in my view any better than any other, Harry Crews grabs me by the collar and yanks me into his story as forcefully as Louis Auchincloss, to cite but one extreme example. I feel comfortable with a range of social classes, an observation that could well be considered as self-serving on some levels, but I leaven the observation with the awareness that I can and do visit a wide range of characters, say Flem Snopes and Jeeter Lester, with the likes of Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, and Richard III.

Characters are having more and more to make accommodations in these matters of time, place, and class. The young, the adult, the middle-aged, and the elderly must perforce mix if only in response to the undeniable reality that there are more of each of us than ever before. We ignore each other at our peril and at the peril of a good story.