The Unstable Self

Write a story that alternates between the I and the he or she (or name of the narrator), making sure you don’t confuse the reader with the switches. You might also consider other ways of indicating stability –voices (in italics), commands. Or out of body perspectives. Why would this be useful or necessary? Imagine a situation where a character is under such stress that he cannot think straight – or perhaps she’s madly in love and doesn’t carte if she thinks in standard-issue thoughts. Josh Russel, the author on Yellow Jack, supplied the basic idea for this exercise. 500 words

I believe that attached third – person narration is the most accurate representation of how we think and live our lives, but many late – twentieth-century fiction writers came to distrust the third person, seeing it as the method of popular and genre fictions, which accepted the nineteenth-century notion of a stable fictional world and the suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, we rarely use the I in thoughts during everyday movements and activities. The first-person pronoun is provoked by others; it bursts out when you need to differentiate yourself from the surrounding world of other egos. Psychologists say that most people cannot remember new names on first hearing them because they’re replacing the stranger’s name in their minds with their own names as a defense mechanism.

The late Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times many years ago about a friend of his who had recently retired from psychoanalytic practice. The friend turned to reading novels because he missed “all the details of being and doing.” “Tell me,” Broyard said, “what do you miss most? What did your patients give you that fiction doesn’t?” His friend thought a while (and we should note Broyard’s implicit catty criticism of fiction – he was one of the regular reviewers of it for The New York Times) and said:

Most of all, I miss incongruity. A psychoanalyst, or at least this one, is constantly refreshed, even sustained by the gorgeous incongruities that people produce under stress. Such a wrench of perspective is a measure of our range, our suppleness. Occasionally a patient will go through the kind of abrupt self-transcendence that’s one of the glories of our species. Without transition, she’ll leap from the disgusting to the sublime, from the petty of mundane to the wildest shores of human sensibility.

My most common criticism of much contemporary traditional fiction is that it does not reflect these wrenches of perspective. Look for the musical sound of abrupt self-transcendence. Play with the idea that your football-playing character can move from relentlessly monotonous statements to a warbling and even girlish delight in his voice when he discovers the first violets peeping out on his mother’s backyard.