Since writing my review of The Butcher’s Daughter—and really since I finished reading Never Anyone But You—I’ve been thinking about my strongly negative reaction to how the narrators function. On the one hand, it seems wrong to complain about narrators who don’t tell us what they think about events. One could easily argue that it’s the reader’s job to come up with their own ideas. On the other hand—and the hand I tend to embrace here—reading about a narrator who functions solely as a witness is a hollow experience. It feels like reading half a book. Why use a first person narrator if that narrator never becomes a fully realized character?
Let me go back to the first hand. Readers are supposed to come up with their own interpretations of what’s happening on the page. In fact, I get a kick out of unreliable narrators precisely because I like to tease out what really happened from the narrator’s account. Part of my problem with this witness narrator, who simply recounts what they see with little or no commentary, is that it seems like a clumsy way to replicate with a limited or omniscient third person narrator does with ease. Why insert a two-dimensional character in between the reader an events? Third person narrators get out of the way. The witness narrator just blocks the view.
On to the second hand, with the witness narrator standing between us and the events, we have to wonder about them. Who are they? What do they feel? What do they think? They’re a character; we have to figure out why they’re there. In the case of Never Anyone But You, I never really got a sense of our narrator other than that she was a fictional James Boswell. That narrator had more of an emotional life than the narrator of The Butcher’s Daughter, who seemed like a hugely disappointing missed opportunity. Both of these books could have had a bigger impact on me if it they had had third person narrators or if the narrators had been fully developed. One way or another, I wouldn’t have been left annoyed and puzzled.
Has anyone else encountered characters like these? Do you think I’m judging these narrators (and their creators) too harshly?