HOW TO READ A NOVEL

Framed narratives
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In the videos we looked at aspects relating to temporality -

things like flashbacks and narrative duration. Another thing
to remember when thinking about the world of a novel is that
not every detail is likely to be communicated to the reader.
Although I suggested earlier that some authors go into
tremendous detail about seemingly trivial incidents, most
novelists are much more sparing with the amount of material
they offer us, while others seem to deliberately withhold
information from the reader. Now we’re going to look at gaps
or ellipses in the plot – those aspects we feel are being kept
from us, the result either of some sort of structural difficulty
with accessing the story, or of a narrator whom we feel we
cannot trust.

To take the first of these issues first: in some instances the crux,
or the truth, governing the plot might be there, but in order to
reach it we as readers are required to first read a series of
preliminary notes, or “frames”. These might take the form of a
preface, introductory letter, or opening note about how the narrator
came to be in possession of the story we are about to read.
Consider the following example from Jonathan Swift’s 1726
novel  Gulliver’s Travels, where the so-called “publisher” introduces
Gulliver’s account of his travels, and offers a veneer of authenticity
to the rest of the text:

THE AUTHOR of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my antient

and intimate Friend; there is likewise some Relation between us
by the Mother’s Side…

Before he quitted Redriff, he left the Custody of the following

Papers in my Hands, with the Liberty to dispose of them as I
should think fit. I have carefully perused them three Times: The
style is very plain and simple; and the only Fault I find is, that the
Author, after the Manner of Travelers, is a little too circumstantial.
There is an Air of Truth apparent through the whole; and indeed
the Author was so distinguished for his Veracity, that it became a
Sort of Proverb among his Neighbours at Redriff, when any one
affirmed a Thing, to say it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke
it.

This type of “framing narrative” is only really significant, though,

when it seeks to alter or influence the way in which we understand
the main body of the text. All Swift’s frame has done is suggest
that we should take the rest of the story seriously – that it is
accurate and genuine: it has an “Air of Truth” about it, and Gulliver
is already known amongst acquaintances for his “Veracity”.

Other frames, on the other hand, have many more layers, and are
much more complicated. A famous example of this is Mary
Shelley’s 1818 novel  Frankenstein. This novel is entirely made up of
letters written by someone called Robert Walton to his sister.
Within these letters, the story of a secondary narrator, that of
Victor Frankenstein, is embedded. And within that account from
Victor, we hear a series of other stories, not least that told by
Victor Frankenstein’s monster.

A frame story, then, of which this is a key example, contains

another story, or even several other stories, within that outside
structure. It is useful to think of this as a series of concentric
circles enveloping the main plot, making it progressively more
difficult for the reader to reach the truth at its core. Because more
than simply providing us with another layer of narrative, what each
of these frames also do (certainly in the case of Mary Shelley’s
novel), is bring their own personality and prejudices to bear on the
story it encloses. For instance: in one of the opening letters to his
sister, Robert Walton hints at the fact that, firstly, he is captivated
by Victor, and secondly, that his account will not be strictly
accurate:
I have resolved every night, when I am not imperatively occupied
by my duties, to record, as nearly as possible in his own words,
what he has related during the day. If I should be engaged, I will at
least make notes. This manuscript will doubtless afford you the
greatest pleasure; but to me, who know him, and who hear it from
his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in
some future day! Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned
voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their
melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation,
while the lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within.
Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which
embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it – thus!

Given these preconceptions Walton admits to having about Victor

and his story, we can assume that when he appears to hand over
the narrative to Victor at the start of Chapter One, his presence
and personality will continue to overlay that main story.

Further frames and unreliable

narrators
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Joseph Conrad’s 1899 text Heart of Darkness is structured in a

similar way to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the central plot is
communicated to the reader by Marlow, but he is introduced
to us by another narrator, who remains anonymous, but who
has the first and last words. And within Marlow’s narration,
which we follow for much of the novel, there is another story
– that of Kurtz – which never really gets told, and which feels
ultimately unknowable, enigmatic. And again, within Kurtz’s
own narrative, there are several other plots which he has
constructed – a lie he asks Marlow to pass on to his fiancée
after his death, and the manuscript of a report he has written.
Marlow’s own narrative style – the way he tells his version of the
plot – is also worth considering here. This brings us onto that
second issue of the unreliable narrator. That anonymous voice
introducing us to Marlow appears to be bored by Marlow, and is
dismissive about what he has to say: he describes him as sitting in
“the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without
a lotus-flower” – that is, without the enlightenment linked to that
role.

A little later, when Marlow begins to tell his story, the narrator
remarks rather wearily that “we knew we were fated, before the
ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive
experiences”. Given the rather fed-up tone of the narrator’s
introduction, there may be reasons to question the accuracy of
what he reports of Marlow’s story.

But Marlow himself, although placing himself in the position of

storyteller, also appears to be wilfully obstructing us from getting
at the crux, or the truth, of what he is telling us: he claims, for
instance, not to belong to a world of straightforward facts, as
though language has lost its power to communicate a stable,
irrefutable meaning. Consider the following passage, when Marlow
breaks off from a difficult, possibly incriminating, part of his story:

”. . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-

sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which
makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence.
It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone . . .”

Some experiences, Marlow suggests here, are literally

“unspeakable”, and elude the authority of language. Note also
those ellipses, a sign of uneasy hesitation, as his words drift off.

Another reason not to trust Marlow is down to the fact that he is

personally involved in the plot he narrates. This tends to be a key
basis for unreliability. He seems intent on justifying his
involvement in colonial systems and explaining his reverence for
the mysterious Kurtz. But this proves difficult to do, and Marlow’s
plot is therefore full of holes: his narrative style is characterised by
gaps and dashes, as he tries to avoid telling us the truth:

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would
look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose
myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were
many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked
particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that), I would put
my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. The North
Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been
there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places
were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude
over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . .
well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet – the biggest,
the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.

Notice how again that ellipsis appears when Marlow wishes to

avoid talking about something – in this case, colonialism. These
holes in the narrative indicate to the alert reader that he cannot be
trusted; he is skirting around the truth, rather than telling us things
directly.

There are even moments when he admits to lies that he had told
to protect the appalling Kurtz and his reputation, thereby
cementing this impression of untrustworthiness, and further
suggesting that his value system must be flawed if he is intent on
protecting such an individual.

It is often the case that the narrator is unreliable when the plot is
being communicated to us by a character who feels obliged to
explain or excuse their own past behaviour.

Narrative perspective
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There is one final thing to consider in this context: the voice,
or perspective narrating the events of the novel. Because
sometimes the narration, while appearing to be from a third-
person viewpoint (an omniscient narrator, in other words), in
fact adopts the mind-style, or verbal tics, of a particular
character. But the third-person narrator’s authority is never
entirely relinquished; the character’s voice doesn’t take over,
but is instead filtered, or mediated, through the narrator. The
opening few lines of Mrs Dalloway are sufficient to
demonstrate this:

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy
had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their
hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men would be coming.

While the first sentence here feels unremarkable – simply reported

speech – by the second sentence we appear to have shifted to
Clarissa Dalloway’s point of view: it is she, presumably, who
knows who Lucy is and would call her by her first name. We might
also guess that the phrase “cut out for her” is Clarissa’s more
casual mode of expression, rather than belonging to the narrator.

The narrator here appears to ventriloquize or adopt, rather than

describe externally, the distinctive language or register of the
character. A process of intermingling takes place between
character and narrator, a technique known as “free indirect style”
whereby a sentence or a passage is presented to us from a third-
person narrator but is in fact modified, or driven, by the mind-style,
or individual perception, of a particular character.

Some important things to look out for when reading a novel,

therefore, include the presence of a preliminary frame that
suggests to us ways we might read the proceeding narrative – or
hints at the fact that editing decisions have been made that have
manipulated or undermined the central plot in some way.
And we should also be wary of the person in charge of the plot:
are there indications that this narrator might be less trustworthy
than they seem?

 Do they have specific reasons to conceal certain details?

 What seems to be missing from their account?

 And finally, can we be certain that this is the perspective of

our narrator, or has another character been allowed to
colonise the narrator’s voice, presenting us with a more
subjective take on events?

What examples of unreliable narrators have you come across in

your own reading? What was their effect on you as a reader?

Girl by Edna O’Brien (image courtesy of Faber)

In the previous steps we looked at some of the ways in which
authors structure their novels in order to play around with time; we
also considered issues relating to narration, such as “frames” and
free indirect style. We’re now going to apply our understanding of
some of these devices to a contemporary novel - Edna
O’Brien’s Girl.

Girl is based on the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by the terrorist

organisation, Boko Haram, in Northern Nigeria in 2014. This mass
abduction led to the international campaign, “Bring Back Our
Girls”; eventually some of the abductees were released, or
escaped - some had been forced to marry their captors, some
contracted HIV, many had had children - but many were never
found. Edna O’Brien was inspired to write a novel inspired by
these events by reading about one of the “girls”, who had
managed to escape, and was found wandering lost with her baby,
and who did not even know her own name.

Girl is told from the first-person point of view of one of these girls.
The novel opens with Maryam, as we later discover she is called,
recalling the night of the kidnapping - “that first awful night, when I
and my friends were snatched from the school”. Maryam goes on
to recount her experiences in the Boko Haram compound, where
she is gang raped, married, and has a child. The novel also details
Maryam’s subsequent escape, and battle to readjust to life with
her family and to protect her child. As if to mirror the trauma
undergone by Maryam, the novel is non-chronological and skips
between the present of Maryam’s life after her escape from her
captors, and the past of both her time in the compound and her
memories of her life before her abduction.

Time in the novel

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The narrative is written almost entirely in the past tense, as if

one long traumatic flashback, and the novel’s opening
sentence signals both this temporal register and the trauma
to come: “I was a girl once, but not any more.” The rest of the
first short chapter describes what happened to Maryam and
her schoolmates on “that first awful night”. The past tense of
the framing narrative is cut through with occasional uses of
the present tense, adding to the immediacy of Maryam’s
account:

The sudden pah-pah of gunshot in our dormitory and men, their

faces covered, eyes glaring, saying they are the military come to
protect us, as there is an insurrection in the town. We are afraid,
but we believe them. Girls staggered out of bed and others came
in from the veranda, where they had been sleeping because it was
a warm, clammy night.

The moment we heard Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, we knew. They

had stolen our soldiers’ uniforms to get past security. They pelted
questions at us - Where is the boys’ school, Where is the cement
kept, Where are the storage rooms. When we told them we did not
know, they went crazy. Then, some others ran in to say they could
not find any spare parts or petrol in the sheds, which led to
argument.

They could not go back empty-handed or their commander would

be furious. Then, amid the clamour, one of them with a grin said,
‘Girls will do,’ and so we heard an order for more trucks to be
despatched.

Interspersed with the account of the abduction are details which

emphasise the youthful innocence of the girls’ lives before their
kidnapping: copybooks, satchels, a hanky, and Maryam’s diary.
This opening chapter ends with a section narrated in the present
tense. Maryam and her child are alone in a harsh arid landscape,
looking for food and water:

She cries from the pit of her empty belly, hoarse savage cries and
I say to her, ‘You have no name and no father.’ I bark at her.
Sometimes I want to kill her. My breasts are the size of egg cups
and she is tugging at the nipples, as if she too wants to kill me. We
search for a well, because the water in the ditches is brown and
muddy. It tastes foul. We drink the clear water in the cavity of the
big rocks. I cup my hands in it and she laps it up eagerly, swallows
it, as if she might choke. Those are our moments of grace, fresh
water, a little reprieve from thirst and hopelessness. I have no
notion of what day it is, or what month, or what year. All I know is
that the air is scudded with sand, sand blowing in from the Sahel,
that scrapes our eyes and half blinds us.

Note the urgency of this scene, with its clipped language and short
sentences, and the depiction of extreme hunger, thirst, dejection
and fear. In contrast to some of the examples of frame narratives
and flashbacks from earlier steps, Maryam’s is not an authoritative
fixed narrative voice. She does not know “what day it is, or what
month, or what year”, and is unable (or unwilling) to relate certain
information. How this diary-keeping schoolgirl became unmoored
from her previous life, and immersed in a new hellish present, is
the subject of the following chapters.
Sentence structure
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It is worth noting, too, how individual sentences lend

themselves to moments of tension and crisis in the narrative.
Take the following passage, for example:

Men are shouting at me. There are two of them in baggy military
attire, hoisting their guns. One fires into the air, so that the birds fly
out in a frenzy. There is the sudden flapping of wings, birds not
knowing what direction to take and the lower branches swirling
violently. The hush of dawn is broken. The second one takes
phones from his pockets, and untangles the various cords.

The sentences are fairly simple in construction, with one or two

clauses, and no linking words or phrases between them.

The effect here is of a series of impressions which Maryam has

not yet been able to make sense of; she does not know what will
happen next.

Narrative voice
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Step 1.12 considered the novel’s narrative style. Let’s look at

an example from later in the novel. Having escaped her
captors, Maryam is now in the care of the government in a big
city, and is about to be presented to the Nigerian president.

It was a feverish day. Crowds. Speeches. And veneration.

I had been given a new purple dress with a purple lining to hide
with ghastly gore within and also a matching veil. Mama had a
flowered dress with wisps of gold that hung from the seams and
trembled when she moved. Her hair was perfectly braided, in a
salon where they also bathed her feet in a basin of whirling water.
She was still cold with me, and far friendlier to those around her
who were praising her courage and faith.

An aide kept reminding me to smile, so I smiled. She had also

briefed me on what to say and what to withhold. People did not
wish to hear gruesome stories. ‘Nothing negative… nothing
negative,’ she kept whispering in my ear.

We were driven to the President’s residence early so as to avoid

the crowds and any intrusion from press or cameras. When we got
there we were led directly to our seats. A carpet of the same
intricate design led from the hallway into the reception room,
where the flags of the neighbouring states were furled on poles,
inside the bay of the window. Pink curtains were drawn to shut out
the glare of the sun. Chairs were placed on either side of the
central aisle and different chairs at the very top in a semicircle
where the President and his entourage would sit. They were
covered in a peach-coloured satin and there was not a stain on
them. Everything was perfect, the chalk-white mouldings of the
ceiling, the shining wooden columns, the exact folding of the
curtains and yet it felt cheerless. I smelt flowers but there were
none. I reckoned that the room had been sprayed earlier to give a
semblance of nature. We sat stiffly. I could hear Mama’s gigantic
sighs. Maybe her dress was too tight. An urge overcame me to
slip away wherever Babby was. I felt she needed me.

There are several things to note in this passage. Consider how the
outward appearance of physical wellbeing presented by Maryam
and her mother is undercut by the description of Maryam’s “gore
within” and her mother’s coldness towards her. This both suggests
the long-term mental effects of Maryam’s captivity - for her, as well
as for those around her - and indicates that her return to safety will
come with its own problems and sadnesses. The repeated
injunction from the president’s aide that Maryam is to say “nothing
negative” indicates the inability, or unwillingness, of the adults
around Maryam to hear anything about her experiences in the
Jihadi camp. Just as the first sentence of the novel emphasised
Maryam’s loss of girlhood, these details draw our attention to the
weight of experience borne by the kidnapped girls - and the
relative innocence of the adults around them.

As in the excerpts we have looked at in the earlier steps, the

narrative is very much rooted in the moment it is describing, and is
comprised of a series of descriptions, or impressions, of that
moment - with very little signposting either forwards or backwards.
The review linked to below suggests that, “everything
in Girl seems to happen suddenly, out of the blue or in the
darkness of deep night. he novel hurtles, as its heroine is hurtled,
from one thing to another and another and another, with
deranging, near-hallucinatory speed. The random-seeming quality
of the storytelling is something new for O’Brien, whose usual pace
is more measured and contemplative. The effect is disorienting,
and it’s meant to be.” This disorienting effect is one which runs
throughout the whole novel, and is arguably one of its most
important features.

Limited information
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Maryam’s youthfulness is also emphasised by the many

instances in which the narrative omits certain key details or
pieces of information - presumably because these are details
which Maryam herself does not know. The phrase “Boko
Haram” is never used, for instance, even though that is the
name by which most readers of the novel would know the
novel’s “Jihadis”. And, here, as Maryam is first being driven
into Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, it is notable that the city
itself is not named, and nor is the national landmark, “Zuma
Rock”, which Maryam sees from the car:
The city is teeming with life. Cars, motorcycles and taxis all edging
their way in and out, the taxis no bigger than perambulators.
Passengers are squeezed into them, their belongings on their
laps. Babby is sound asleep in my arms, despite all the jangle.

Sun beats down on stark white buildings, their black gates ablaze
with spears of gold. Watchmen sit under the shade of the trees,
chatting with policemen who stroll around. Other policemen stand
in narrow white booths, directing traffic and stopping cars. Our car
is waved on, because of a military flag attached to the side of the
bonnet.

The policewoman pointed to what seemed a mountain, but was in

fact a rock, a rock so famous that its picture featured on the
currency notes. She spoke of its fabled history and the many
assaults attached to it. Water ran down its sides into the
innumerable veins, like endless tears of lamentation.