Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Riding Through the Wardrobe. I’m Jonathan Rogers. I’m the instructor for this class. Here’s how this class is going to work. We’re going to be walking through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in the Narnia Chronicles. And I’ll be paying a lot of attention to the nuts and bolts of how C.S. Lewis accomplishes what he accomplishes. Now this is a little different from a lot of literature courses. courses? I mean in one sense it’s a literature course. We’ll be going through this book and treating it as literature. But in a typical literature course you’re kind of moving from the specifics of the story itself, the work of literature itself, out to the big ideas. You tend to go from kind of the small and the specific out to big themes or ideas of symbolism or whatever. And that’s not really what we’re doing here. Instead of moving from the concrete out to the abstract, we’re going to move really from the concrete to the even more concrete. Instead of moving from the micro to the macro, we’re going to be moving from the micro to the even smaller. So I guess I should mention, we may miss some of your favorite parts of this book. In those moments where Aslan, for instance, makes a great speech. We may or may not hit that great speech because what we’re really interested in is how C.S. Lewis creates a world in which that great speech might make sense. Okay. And that’s what I mean when I, that’s why I call this Writing Through the Wardrobe. This is a writing course which I think you’ll also benefit as a, I know you’re going to benefit as a reader of literature, but still my focus is going to be on writing and on the techniques of writing.
What What were C.S. Lewis’s techniques? In this first lesson, we’re going to be talking about narration and point of view. Lewis was, in everything he wrote, he was interested in point of view, you might say. He was always trying to give his readers another way to see, another point of view on truths that they already knew. Or I say truths they already knew. Sometimes they might have known it or they might not have known these truths. But if you think about, in the screw tape letters for instance, that is a story that really works on point of view. We are seeing what the spiritual struggles look like from the point of view of demons. We’re going to get into some of the interesting things that Lewis does with point of view in the Narnia books. But whether he was writing fiction or non-fiction, he was always interested in how do we see what we see. And that’s really what point of view means. It’s really about vision. If you think about in real life point of view, I mean think about if you were the witness to a car crash, right? Where you stand when you witness that car crash has a profound impact on what you see. And so the point of view of the person in car A is very different from the point of of the person in car B and then there’s another perspective from the bystanders, right? And so our point of view very much shapes story and our narrators shape story. So let’s do some definitions here. What is point of view? Well we’ll start with the dictionary definition which is only so helpful. The narrator’s position in relation to the story being told is the point of view according to the dictionary. Well, as I said, that’s only somewhat helpful. I’m not going to spend, actually I’m not going to spend any more time on that. Let’s move on to a working definition I think we’ll find helpful and that is what can you see from the eyeballs of the person who’s telling the story? And I always, I say eyeballs because I want you to think about the physical facts of point of view, right. It really is important to think in terms of what can, whoever’s narrating the story, what exactly can they see. And literally what can they see. And so when I talk about looking through a narrator’s eyes, and this might be a first person narrator, it might be a third person narrator. There are really two questions there. What can that person, that narrator actually see physically, right? If there was a car crash right outside the window here where I’m standing, there are some things I might be able to see and there are things I can’t see, right? I can’t see what’s going on on the other side of the car. I can only see what’s going on on this side of the car. So So physically, what can a person see? But then also, what do they do, what does this narrator do with what they see, right? How do they interpret? That’s also a very important part of point of view. So in other words, to return to the car crash example, the person in car A interprets what they see. When they tell that story to the police, right, they’re going to have their own reasons for telling the story the way they tell it, right? They’re going to interpret those facts. Even if the objective facts don’t change, their subjective experience of those facts is different from the subjective experience of the person in car B or the person who is the bystander, right?
So point of view is both what you can see and how you interpret what you see. OK, now point of view and narrator aren’t exactly the same thing, but you You may find me using them more or less synonymously. Three main kinds of narrators. They are the first person narrator, the third person omniscient narrator, and the third person limited or close narrator. There’s also such thing as a second person narrator. I’m not going to talk about it. It doesn’t usually work. It comes across as gimmicky and I don’t suggest that you try it. So we’re just going to talk about these three kinds of narrators. A first-person narrator, now this is the kind of stuff you probably learned in junior high, what do they call it, not literature, they call it language arts now.
So you probably learned this in language arts. First-person narrator is a narrator who’s actually a character in the story. Now so if you think about Huck Finn, you know Huck Finn is telling the story of Huck Finn’s adventures. To Kill a Mockingbird is told from the point of view of Scout, right. Now it’s Scout as an adult looking back on her childhood and telling a story which is a little different from Huck Finn who’s sort of–who’s still a child when he’s telling his story. about a story like, oh what’s the, Dr. Watson is the narrator of Sherlock Holmes, right? That’s a first person narrator, a very different kind of first person narrator than either Scout or Huck Finn because he’s a character in the story but he’s not the main character of the story, right? He’s just kind of telling, you know, telling about the adventures of this person that he hangs out with and that’s a different kind of first person narrator. But in each case, the narrator is a character in the story. And so when we see that–think about what you gain from that kind of narration. You get a much closer view of what’s going on. The reader gets a better sense of what it’s like to be in that story, right? We’re always as writers trying to invite a reader into a story. And so with a first-person narrator, it’s a little bit easier to invite that reader into a story because they’re kind of alongside one of the characters in the story. That’s one of the huge advantages of a first-person narrator. Another thing I love about first-person narration is that it’s almost like you get this free extra layer in a story. So you’ve got both the action that is being narrated, and we might be reading a story because we’re interested in the plot, but it’s really interesting to see how do the characters or how does this narrator view those actions, right? I’m interested in the plot but I’m also interested in how Huck Finn sees that plot. I mean Huck Finn has his own understanding of what happened to him in that story and that is just as interesting as the story itself, right?
And so you get this extra bonus layer when you have a first person narrator. And the other thing I want to just–I’m going to bring this up now and we’re going to come back to it in a little while. You are as the reader, when you’re reading a first-person narrator, you’re always, your judgment is always on. You’re always trying to make sense of why is this person telling me this? And this is true in real life, right? When you, if you’re a parent for instance, and a tattle, one of your kids comes and tattle-tales on the other kid, you don’t just take that at face value, right? You don’t just look at the facts. You sort of judge, is this narrator, this person, this first-person narrator who’s about this tall, does that person, why are they telling me this story this way? And you are judging, right? This is what we do all day every day when people tell us stories. We are judging their trustworthiness. We’re wondering why they’re telling us this story, why are they telling it this way. So to return to the parent with the child who’s tattletailing, they’re always, that parent’s always waiting for that other kid to come and give their side of the story. And then they’re going to, they’re not just adjudicating the truth of the story, they’re sort of adjudicating these two narrators, right? And that’s one of the most fascinating things to me about a first-person narration. When you read Huck Finn, the whole time you’re kind of trying to figure out Huck and why he’s telling the story this way. And he has this sort of childlike naivete about the world he finds himself in. In some ways he’s very wise and in some ways he’s very naive. we’re always judging that narration, which you don’t do in the same way with a third-person narrator. We tend to trust a third-person narrator a little more implicitly. Not completely. We may get to that in a minute. Now, also with a first-person narrator, and this is really important, you are accepting some major limitations, okay? You can only, if you’re a writer writing in first person, You can only give information that that narrator can know. And then you have to think about how would they know that information, right? If you’ve got a first-person narrator who’s telling about some event that they weren’t there for, how do they know that information? And you’ve got to explain that to the reader. You are accepting major limitations when you write in first-person. Now, those limitations are also what gives that style of narration its charm, right? And that’s what–those same limitations are why we like first-person narration. Now I’m not going to say a whole lot more about first-person narration because the Narnia books are all written in third-person omniscient, which is our second kind of narrator we’re going to talk about here. Third-person omniscient narrator–a third-person narrator is just a narrator, sort of this disembodied voice who doesn’t live in the story, okay. And so I can’t help myself, I always call the narrator in the Narnia books, I refer to him as he. The truth is the narrator is disembodied. He’s not he or she, it’s just this voice. I always say he because C.S. Lewis is a he, or was a he. But the narrator of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not C.S. Lewis. And it’s important that you draw a distinction between the author and the narrator. And sometimes it’s tempting when you’re writing an English paper to say, “As C.S. Lewis says in The Language in the Wardrobe, actually it’s the narrator who said that.” It’s an interesting and helpful distinction. So the third person omniscient narrator–so third person means it’s not a character in the story. Omniscient means this person knows everything and sees everything and is basically omnipresent. So it’s like this godlike figure in the story. So this omniscient narrator can sort of jump around in time, can be two places at once. So your omniscient narrator can start out in Canterbury, tell one scene, and then jump in the next chapter to London and tell about this other thing that’s going on, the omniscient narrator can tell you what character A is thinking and also what character B is thinking. You can kind of jump around from character to character. You know, think about a first-person narrator can only be in that one character’s head. If a second character has feelings, the only way we know that character’s feelings with a first-person narrator is what that first-person narrator observed. the other character told them how they’re feeling or the narrator observed that person’s actions and then interpreted their feelings. But I don’t really know what, I don’t get a direct look at that other character’s thoughts and feelings. Whereas an omniscient narrator can just sort of do a little eavesdropping on one character’s thoughts and then another character’s thoughts and feelings, can move around. So that’s the omniscient narrator. Think about, I mean, you know what omniscient means. It’s somebody who’s like God, and that’s what the omniscient narrator is like. Now that omniscient narrator might comment on the action, right? And so this is, you may recognize this as the opening line from Pride and Prejudice, one of the most famous omniscient narrators in the world.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This narrator, I tend to think of an omniscient narrator as not having personality, right? It’s just a sort of disembodied voice. Well, this is an omniscient narrator and it’s got some personality, doesn’t it? It’s funny. This narrator’s funny, is willing to comment and sort of poke fun at the characters. So this is a good example of one way an omniscient narrator can sort of have a little bit of personality. I think our narrator in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” has personality, right? now and then that narrator will say something funny or, well we’ll get to that in a minute. As I, I can’t remember if I’ve said this already or not, we sort of trust the omniscient narrator. We more or less take the omniscient narrator at his or her word in a way that we don’t in a first person narrator. Remember I said we’re always judging, you know, asking how much can we trust this narrator with a first person narrator. With a third person omniscient narrator, we tend to take that narrator at his word. Like think about this, if a first person narrator were to say, “Cindy is mean to me because she’s jealous of my good looks,” right? You as a reader are immediately saying, “Is that true or is that not true?” Right? Does this narrator really know why Cindy’s mean to her? Is this the narrator? I mean, think about it. If anybody in the world were to say to you in real life, Cindy’s mean to me because she’s jealous of my good looks, you would start saying, hmm, are you good-looking enough to inspire that kind of jealousy? I mean, you would judge that kind of thing, right? You don’t take that at face value. Whereas if a third-person omniscient narrator were to say, Cindy was mean to Selena because she was jealous of her good looks, think how differently you read that, right?
That’s a different experience. We believe that on its face. We think, well, I guess that must be true because the omniscient narrator says that. Now, you may not be thinking that consciously, right? You may not even be aware that you’re taking that a little more at face value than the first person narrator. But I guarantee you, you do. So that’s a good example of why it makes a difference whether you’ve got a first-person narrator or a third-person narrator. That third-person narrator just has a little distance from the situation and therefore we take that truth as if it were objective truth. Okay, moving on. Finally, the third-person close narrator. I’m not going to have a whole lot to say about that. I’m sorry, third-person limited, which I say I, lots of people sometimes call close narration. All this means is, again, because of the third-person narrator, that’s a disembodied voice who’s who’s not in the story, it’s not a character in the story who’s narrating the story. But remember I talked about how a first-person narrator is limited to the experience and understanding of a first-person, I’m sorry, of that one character. A limited third-person narrator accepts the limitation that they’re probably only going to be able to see what one character can see. more to the point, it’s probably more accurate to say we’re only going to eavesdrop on one character’s thoughts, no more than one character’s thoughts, and we’re going to tend to see things the way that character sees them. And so again, in a third-person limited narration, like my Wilder King stories are told from the point of view of Aiden, all right. The protagonist is this character named Aiden, and we don’t really see anything that Aiden can’t see. There’s one chapter in book one that I broke that rule. I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it at the time. But he — every scene in that book, except for one, Aiden is in that scene, and we’re seeing what he sees. That’s what we call third-person limited or close narration. And again, and sometimes that narrator starts to see things the way that character sees things. Remember I talked about the point of view is not just what you can see but how you interpret what you see. And so a writer like Flannery O’Connor is really great at limited third-person narration because that narrator sometimes gets sucked into the orbit of the way that one character thinks. So again, by accepting those limitations, you gain, yes, you give up some things, but you gain a kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for, a, well just an immediacy that you don’t really have from the omniscient narrator who stands out here. Okay, I’m not going to say much more about the third person limited narrator because that just because our narrator in The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe is an omniscient third-person narration narrator.
Okay, now, you in junior high, as I said, you already learned the difference between first-person narration, third-person omniscient narration and third-person limited narration probably.
And hopefully my discussion here has given you a better idea of why it matters. But here’s something you may not have learned in junior high language arts class and that is the difference between close narration and distant narration. And in many ways, for my money, this is more interesting than first person, third person omniscient, third person limited. Okay, let’s see, I think I’ve got–okay. All right. Close narration. by close narration. The narrator, and therefore the reader, stands very close to the experience of the characters and close to the middle of the action. That is close narration. Now, you might have a close, even an omniscient narrator can always zoom in and get close to one character at any time. We tend to think of first-person narration as being, you know, always close, that’s not actually true. I mentioned Dr. Watson in the–good grief–Sherlock Holmes. I have a hard time remembering Sherlock Holmes for some reason. Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes is a first-person narrator but he stands outside the action. So he’s not actually a super close narrator most of the time. Sometimes he gets close but he usually kind of stands farther apart. So that’s what close narration is. Distant narration, the narrator stands farther away from the action. And so a good example, and we’re going to get to this in a little more detail in just a minute, think about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe starts.
We’ve got a narrator who says there once were four children named Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy and they went to the professor’s house to escape the air rage or something like that. You know, that narrator is standing way out giving us some summary, some explanation, some background. All right, that’s how distant narration works. I’m not in the room with the characters. I’m just out here way outside and so I can get the big picture and that’s the great thing about distant narration is you can get a nice big picture. Now what you lose is the immediacy and the experience of being in the room. All right, let’s see what we got next here. Okay, well let’s look at how the–what kind of narrator we have in The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’ve already mentioned that we have an omniscient third person narrator. How do we know this is a third person omniscient narrator? Sometimes it’s hard to know in the first few pages of a story exactly what kind of narrator we have. I mean you can usually on the first paragraph or two know whether we’ve got a first person narrator or a third person narrator but the truth is we tend to start kind of distant and you don’t know is this an omniscient narrator or is it not, right. A third person limited narrator is going to talk a lot like an omniscient narrator at the beginning and so but we know this is–you know within the first couple of pages we know this is an omniscient narrator because for one thing this narrator eavesdrops on more than one character’s thoughts and feelings And so in this one sentence we get inside two different characters’ heads. He, the professor, was so odd looking that Lucy, who was the youngest, was a little afraid of him and Edmund, who was the next youngest, wanted to laugh and had to keep up pretending he was blowing his nose to hide it.
Alright, so that–only an omniscient narrator can jump from one character’s head to another. And let’s see what else we got. Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier. One thing that an omniscient narrator does that we know this as an omniscient narrator is that he tells us things about the characters that the characters may not even know about themselves, right?
Huck Finn can’t tell you things about Huck Finn that Huck Finn doesn’t know, right? That first-person narrator can’t do that. A limited third-person narrator is probably not going to do that, but an omniscient narrator can tell you things about a character that the character doesn’t know about himself or herself. So Edmund says, “Oh, come off it,” said Edmund, who was tired and pretending not to be tired, which always made him bad-tempered. Okay, that’s the kind of thing that Edmund probably doesn’t know about himself, right? That’s the kind of thing you don’t–that an outside person might know about you, but you tend not to know about yourself. So this is another clue that we have an omniscient narrator. And again, you lose some things with an omniscient narrator. You lose that immediacy that you get from a first-person narrator. This is the kind of stuff you get in exchange. These kind of insights that a character can’t have, sometimes the omniscient narrator has. Okay, so we establish in the first couple of pages we’ve got an omniscient narrator. The next question is, is this a close narrator or is it a distant narrator? Alright, that’s a trick question because the narrator, especially an omniscient narrator, can sometimes come close and sometimes back out, alright. And so whereas the first person, third person, you know, third person omniscient, third person limited, whether that, whereas that’s a one-time choice for the writer, the question of whether we’ve got a close narration or a distant narration, that’s a choice you’re making every page. You have to decide, is this a moment where I want to zoom in on one character, or is this a moment where it’s better to back out and sort of give background, give explanation, give summary, that kind of stuff? Well, so this is a really not a good question. It was a trick question. Sometimes this narrator is close, sometimes this narrator is distant. So I want to show three places in the first chapter where our narrator goes from being distant to being kind of, you know, in this middle ground between distant and close and then really close narration.
So this is the first lines of the story. Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them during the war because of the air raids. Alright, that’s, and then we skip a little bit, talking about the professor. He had no wife and lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs. McCready and three servants. Their names were Ivy, Margaret, and Betty, but they do not come into the story much. Alright, look how distant this is. We’re just standing way outside the story and we’re getting, you know, Here is a big–some big picture information, some background information that you as the reader need to know in order to get this–understand this story.
The reason I included this second one is the second passage, which I think is still the first page, this narrator is so distant that this narrator can even tell you things that aren’t even in the story, right? This narrator is standing way out–they know–this narrator knows so much about the story that they even know the names of these servants who don’t even figure out the story. So this is what we mean by distant narration. It’s really helpful for providing background, summary, explanation, that kind of stuff. But it doesn’t invite you into the room with the characters. On about page three, after all that kind of big background explanation, we actually find ourselves in the room with Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy and we have this line.
We fall on our feet and no mistake, said Peter, this is going to be perfectly splendid. Alright, I’m calling this sort of middle ground because we are in the room with them. observing what these four children are doing and what they’re saying to one another, but we’re not really getting the experience of any one of them, right? This is kind of the workhorse of storytelling, this kind of middle ground between distant narration and close narration. This is what we call showing instead of telling, right? We’re just kind of in the room. It’s as if you had a camera set up in the room and you see what the camera sees, right. That is–that’s what we mean by showing. You may have heard the saying from writing teachers, “show, don’t tell.” Well this is showing. And it’s–you know, no matter what kind of narrator you got, whether it’s a first person, third person omniscient, third person limited, you’re going to have a lot of this kind of storytelling which is not really distant, not really close, just kind of the way we we typically tell stories in fiction writing.
But then we get to a passage like this. Now we’re talking about Lucy and this is the first time that she goes into the wardrobe. And now look how close we are into Lucy’s experience here. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. I wonder is it more mothball, she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold.” All right, now two reasons I’m saying this is really close narration. One is we’re eavesdropping on her thoughts. So we’re inside her head. You can’t get much closer to the character than that, than being inside her head. So literally, she thinks this, and we get it in quotation marks, right? That’s close narration. But then also, we feel what she feels. We get the experience of– we know what she expects, but instead she feels something cold and powdery. Instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood, she feels this cold powder. That is close narration. That’s where the narrator says, I’m going to put you in this person’s body and let you feel what they feel. So this is about as close as you can get. So think about a couple of things here. We have an omniscient narrator who already knows everything, who knows, for instance, that what Lucy is about to feel is snow. But this omniscient narrator who knows everything, all of a sudden, kind of plays dumb and doesn’t know what it is. It’s just something soft and powdery and cold. No explanation here. That’s what’s great about close narration, is the failure to explain. The distant narrator is really good at explaining. The close narrator says instead of explaining, let me just show you what it was like to be in that situation. And then if you want to be confused, be confused. Now we’re not confused because we’ve read this story before and we know all about it, but just think of this as the first time you’d read this story and you wouldn’t know what was going on. Moving on, this is continuing the same passage. Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur, but something hard and rough and even prickly.
See, we’re feeling her experience, her sensory experience. Why, it is just like the branches of trees, exclaimed Lucy. And when she saw that there was a light ahead of her– and then she saw there was a light ahead of her, not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off.
Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later, she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at nighttime with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.
OK, think about how weird this would be if you didn’t already know this story. At this moment, this key moment of the story, the narrator who’s shown a perfect willingness to explain and know everything and tell us what we need to know isn’t telling us anything except exactly what Lucy experiences. We are invited into her confusion. And this is how–this is why close and–or distant and close narration–why it matters. Sometimes you need to explain, sometimes you need to let your reader just experience what the characters experience and that’s what close narration is for. Lucy’s confused, well so are we, right. It’s not the narrator’s–it’s not always the narrator’s job to explain, sometimes it’s the narrator’s job to confuse us and that’s what happens here. And I think that’s what’s so brilliant about chapter one of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The control with which C.S. Lewis knows now’s the time to be distant, now’s the time to kind of sit in the middle, and now’s the time to come in close. Now’s the time to stop explaining and start just letting the reader experience what these characters experience. Okay, we need to wrap this thing up. So by way of conclusion and summary, that looks like axes. I’m talking about axes, the two axes of narration, which looks just like axes. On the one hand, you’re asking, is this a first-person narrator, is it third-person omniscient, is it third-person limited? That’s one question you do need to answer and you need to think about when you’re writing your own stories, which kind of narrator is going to make the most sense here. Well, that’s a one-time decision. When you decide you’re going to write a third person omniscient narrator, you don’t then later halfway through the story switch into first person narration. You just don’t do that. So you decide that once. But then to me the more interesting question is, is this distant narration or close narration? And that’s a decision that you make page by page. What do I need to do at this point in the story? Sometimes you need to explain, summarize, give the big picture and distant narration is great for that. Sometimes you’re just kind of reporting on what’s happening. That’s that middle ground between the distant narration and close narration and sometimes you really need to invite the reader into the experience of a character and to give a reader an experience that’s similar to the experience of the character. And if the character’s confused, it’s okay for your reader to be a little confused and And that’s when you use close narration. Okay, the danger of the third-person omniscient narrator is that it’s so easy to back out and sort of give the big picture and explain too much. So you have to be careful. When you’re writing in third-person omniscient, you have to be sure that you’re not just sort of living out here in the distance. You’ve got to zoom in. You’ve got to–your reader’s not here to get information. Your reader’s not here to get explanations. The reader’s here for an experience and close narration is really effective for giving experience and that’s what your reader’s there for. So the big danger of third-person omniscient narration is that it’s tempting just to live out there in the distant lands and so watch out for that if you choose to write a third-person omniscient story.
Okay, that’s the end of lesson one. In lesson two we’re going to talk about the ideas of inversion and juxtaposition and then we’re going to talk a little bit about characterization.