How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

In this chapter, Foster turns to examining the fictional world that the characters of a novel inhabit. Whether Marquez’s fabulous Macondo, James Joyce’s “real” Dublin, or J. R. R. Tolkien’s invented Middle Earth, the world of the novel is always fictitious. A strong fictitious world does not need to convince readers that it is real but must appear real for the characters who live in it. Middle Earth is an unreal place for readers but is aesthetically and emotionally the right ethos for its hobbits and orcs. Similarly, the American prairie is the perfect setting for Willa Cather’s realistic novels. Foster’s point is that places in fiction are not real “but must behave as if real” (41).

Foster examines how writers make their world behave as if it is real. Some writers erroneously think a wealth of real details will make a world realistic, weighing the book with exposition and information. The truth is that well-placed and emotionally resonant details can evoke even a real city, like London. Most importantly, the novel’s world must offer the possibility of transporting readers to its reality for a few hours. After all, this transportive experience is why most people read.

Choosing a narrator can be a tough decision for a writer: whether to use an omniscient narrator or a main character, a supporting character, or a combination. While many writers agonize over this decision, the choices are few. Common narrative perspectives include third-person omniscient, or the all-knowing “godlike” narrator of the Victorian novel, and third-person limited, in which the narrator limits their point of view to one character or to one character at a time. The third-person point of view allows for cool, emotionally detached commentary on the characters’ external lives, without delving too much into their thoughts and feelings; conversely, steam-of-consciousness narration delves entirely into the characters’ internal lives. Another popular point of view is first-person central, narrated using “I,” while in first-person secondary, the “I” narrator is a minor character, offering many opportunities to surprise readers. The rarest narrative voice is second-person, wherein a narrator uses the pronoun “you” to tell the story.

Choice of narrator influences everything in the novel, from its length to its plot. Novels narrated in the third-person omniscient tend to be longer, because the narrator knows everything and thus must narrate everything. Such a narrator is inconvenient for a suspense plot because they can see into the mind of every character. A limited third-person narrator or first-person narrator works best for detective fiction, and the choice of which first-person character will narrate sets the tone of the plot. A first-person secondary narrator like Watson enables readers to see, along with him, the brilliant workings of Sherlock Holmes’s mind. Conversely, a first-person narrator in a suspense novel tends to poke fun at themself, showing how they succeed despite being a bumbler.

First-person narrators can be effective in creating an “illusion of immediacy” (50). However, their advantages and disadvantages tend to be the same: They don’t know what others are thinking, often hide something, can be mistaken about themselves and others, and cannot offer the whole truth. Therefore, first-person narrators can be both tricky and beguiling, as Foster explores in the next chapter.

The moment a narrator uses the word “I,” readers can assume that this narrator is unreliable. This does not mean that the narrator is evil or bad but simply that they may not provide enough information to present an accurate account of events. Alternatively, they may be lying to themselves or readers. First-person child narrators like Huck in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) present a skewed version of events because of children’s limited understanding of the world. The pleasure of reading Huckleberry Finn is that readers can see what the child narrator cannot: that the characters Huck considers fine people may be charlatans and brutes. In addition, a first-person child narrator can provide what Foster calls the “Martian perspective” (78) in describing their encounter with the alien world of grown-ups. The innocent first-person narrator is such a useful perspective that sometimes even adult narrators tell a story in a flashback, using their child selves, as in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861).

A grown-up first-person narrator is particularly relevant to tell stories about people who keep secrets, present multiple versions of the same event, or refuse to accept an uncomfortable reality. For instance, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), the narrator reluctantly learns that the employer to whom he has been fiercely loyal was a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. Sometimes, the first-person narrator cannot or will not distinguish between objective reality and their subjective reality, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). Writers who want to create a story that examines “the slippery business of reality, truth, perception, and delusion” (65) often choose a character who (knowingly or not) struggles with reality and truth to tell the story in the first-person point of view.

Literary analysis sometimes overlooks an element called “voice,” even though it gives meaning to a novel. Voice refers to a narrator’s manner, or approach, which reveals important things about the narrator. While many primers on reading and writing focus on “point of view” as if most fiction has a singular perspective, short stories and novels can have many points of view and just as many voices. In Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, a classic of Victorian literature, the narrator Mr. Lockwood recounts what the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, told him about the story of the creepy house in which he finds himself. Lockwood’s voice soon gives way to Nelly’s, and both are distinct from each other. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998) uses as many as six narrative voices, from a middle-aged mother to a five-year-old child. Each voice is unique and gives readers vital clues about the narrator.

The most noticeable voices may be those of larger-than-life and quirky characters, such as the gloomy but enthusiastic Sal Paradise in On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac, but even the most self-effacing third-person narrator has a distinct voice. The omniscient third-person narrator of the classic Victorian novel, for instance, often seems neutral and godlike, but the narrator is nevertheless a fictional construct. The omniscient voice likewise reveals crucial details about this narrator: if they are smug, ironic, indulgent, or self-deprecatory, for example. When a story unfolds from the neutral and straightforward third-person or first-person perspective, readers may sometime think of the narrator as the author. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The narrator is always a fictional construct, even when they seem to closely resemble the author. Austen’s ironic narrator in Pride and Prejudice may seem like a stand-in for the writer but is a persona that has its own voice and shapes how readers interact with the novel.

Foster argues that analyzing a novel’s characters is a process of creation, since readers envision a living entity from the details the novelist provides. The best novelists, though they detail a character in their minds and even in their notes, withhold many details of the character’s life from the novel, at least initially; instead, they reveal enough to compel readers to dig into the character’s words and motives. When readers study a character, they construct their own version of the character, such as Pip (in Dickens’s Great Expectations) or Jim (in Joseph Conrad’s 1900 novel Lord Jim). Each reader creates a different version of Pip and Jim, according to that reader’s peculiarities. While beginner writers—and readers—tend to fixate on a character’s physical description, analysis should move beyond the physical to focus on a character’s inner life.

The same reader may even relate differently to a character at different points in their life. Foster gives his own example to support this hypothesis: When he first read Great Expectations as a young man, he was judgmental of Pip’s youthful folly, but reading it as an older person, Foster is more forgiving of Pip.