Bridge of San Luis Rey: Chat Part Two, or Consider the Narrator
Diablevert: I think, speaking of the ways in which this book is modernist, too — the narrator here is very weird. Because he leads off the book saying this priest is going to write a book about the accident, and then proceeds to say that that book has been burned—
Dreadful Penny: A book that we never see.
Diablevert: Exactly. And the book that we’re reading is being written by someone else, who says he knows more than the priest about these people, but we never learn who this person is, we never know who the narrator really is or how he knows the stuff he knows. He just stays in the background. And I wonder how conscious that is, do you know what I mean?
Dreadful Penny: That’s a good question.
Diablevert: Because sometime you read a book and you see the author start off with some sort of conceit, and it works, but then as the book goes on you don’t really need it anymore, and it just kind of dies off and you don’t really notice. And this felt a bit like that to me. But on the other hand it isn’t that I think he’s incapable of playing around with it consciously. It reminds me a bit of Nabokov’s — I don’t know if you’ve ever read his novella Pnin?
Dreadful Penny: No, I’ve never read Pnin.
Diablevert: It’s interesting because he kind of deliberately does that. He has this narrator who starts off seeming like a typical third-person omniscient narrator, but we gradually learn is actually a character in the book, who actually knows Pnin, and in fact is his replacement, a Russian scholar who has come to take his position in the department. It’s sort of vaguely hinted at in the book, but it’s pretty clear if you’re paying attention to the signals. And as you start to realize who the narrator is it becomes very weird to see the narrator write about Pnin in this third-person way—to speak in such terms about a person he maybe could have known, or been on the edge of knowing, and try to surmise from his perspective how Pnin might feel. It puts him on the edge of omniscience in an interesting way, and Nabokov plays with that. He uses this Narrator character to play with your emotions. Because if the book was written with a traditional omniscient narrator, then when something happens to the Pnin that makes him look kind of pathetic, you’d know that that was how you as a reader were supposed to feel — that the main character was kind of pathetic. But by sticking this sort of half-knowing Narrator in between you and the characters, when something pathetic happens to the characters, and it’s being told to you by such a narrator, you feel that same pity but at the same time you are aware of your own condescension.
Dreadful Penny: That you’re being a little holier-than-thou.
Diablevert: Yes. By having that intermediary character in there, that becomes clear to you. But I’m not sure if that’s how the Narrator was meant to work in this book. Because you could read the book just as the attempt by the Franciscan friar to determine the meaning of these events—
Dreadful Penny: Well, to try to use that accident to try to prove divinity I think was a pretty interesting idea. The end of the book where he goes into the statistics derived from his earlier studies of divinity, and he’s got the axis of goodness vs. piety vs. utility? Trying to figure out whether it proves or disproves all this — it’s a little twee, I guess, but it is kind of a fascinating matrix to try to figure out.
Diablevert: Mmm-hmm.
Dreadful Penny: But there’s no conclusions made in the book.
Diablevert: But I think that’s what’s interesting, because you have this Narrator that’s in-between them. It’s not just being told to you by a Franciscan friar, who thinks this way, and comes at it with this attitude of “I can determine the truth of this.” It’s being told to you by a Narrator, who says “There is such a person, [who thinks he can determine the truth],” but who does not himself seem to believe that [truth can be found]. That gets a little fuzzy to explain, but it’s interesting, because it’s pretty clear that the Narrator’s perspective on the events is different from the Franciscan friar’s perspective.
Dreadful Penny: Totally, completely.
Diablevert: And we get it filtered through both of their perspectives.
April 16, 2010 at 6:27 am
Given the Narrator’s remarkably progressive attitudes about women (revealed when the Abbess is discussed….a character, incidentally, I’d have loved to know more about, especially the “grief” in her past that I don’t recall ever seeing revealed), I’d assumed that the Narrator was rather transparently Wilder, or rather “Wilder”. I agree that the Narrator is very good at navigating that middle path where the answers aren’t pat. And yet somehow (strangely) the story all did seem to “fit”….there’s something about all five deaths that “makes sense” in the back of my head, though I couldn’t possibly explain how. The statistics of Brother Juniper were ridiculous and telling, I thought. Just the reflection on how almost every member of the community is intensely useful was, I thought, a real comment on modern American values. And isn’t it a little interesting that even Brother Juniper distinguishes between being good and being pious, as though even he accepts that being devout and being decent are often, if not mutually exclusive, at least independent variables.
Thanks for the tip re: Pnin, by the way. My wife’s obsessed with Nabokov, and it’s sitting on the shelf….maybe a good “break from Pulitzer” novel to throw into my bag for the bus.