In a "Gatsby" type story, how does a narrator relate what he doesn't get to see?
"The Great Gatsby" was told from the point of view of Gatsby's neighbor, Nick Carraway by name, with Nick using the first person. Nick gets to see a lot, but not all of Gatsby's dealings. A case in point is Gatsby's early dealings with Dan Cody, his mentor, at age 17. What gives Nick the "right" to relate these dealings? Can a narrator "show, rather than tell," by featuring dialog and interaction between Gatsby and Cody? Or must he limit himself to a second hand narrative of those dealings?
Actually, I created a story within a story as follows: First, I wrote it in third person from "Gatsby's" point of view. Then I put on my "Nick Carraway" hat and commented on the story that I was now able to read. Can a format like this make sense?
I think this is a matter of opinion; successful stories have been written that break all kinds of writing conventions. …
5y ago
In Jane Austen's novels, for example, it happens more than once that characters learn about an event second-hand: > Dar …
6y ago
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2 answers
I think this is a matter of opinion; successful stories have been written that break all kinds of writing conventions.
For my part, in particular for a beginning writer, I'd recommend sticking to the convention that such stories do NOT break POV, it is Nick Carraway (or Dr. Watson), all the way.
Engineer your story so that Gatsby has some reason to tell Nick Carraway what the reader needs to know, or so that some third party tells Nick.
That can be something that actually occurs in the future:
I did not know it at this time, but I learned later, from the officers conducting the investigation, that the following transpired:
How did the "officers" know it? The reader won't care about that, it sounds plausible that nosy Nick Carraway could have put the pieces together.
In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson pulls together the story from Sherlock himself, from victims and witnesses, from villain confessions, etc.
So, CAN messing with the conventions work? Sure, but if you are not already a well-known, published and respected author, it will likely be seen as an amateur move, a lack of imagination on your part because you couldn't figure out how to keep the book in character, and had to break the "fourth wall" in order to complete the story.
Don't think that because some best-selling author has done something, that gives you permission to do it also. Some authors get lucky and tell a story so compelling that their errors are overlooked by publishers. JK Rowling and Dan Brown get panned by better best-selling writers fairly often, but their writing mistakes are overwhelmed by their imaginative stories.
You can hope for the same luck, but I'd let your mistakes be things you didn't even know you were doing and couldn't help; I would not introduce errors you know are errors.
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In Jane Austen's novels, for example, it happens more than once that characters learn about an event second-hand:
Darling, I've just heard that...
Or
It is only the desire to be useful that compels me to tell you that...
This allows you to introduce events that your narrator couldn't have witnessed, and it's not as boring as you might think: characters might learn about a past event in a dramatic moment (making previous decisions they've made suddenly wrong), the person recounting the event might colour it with their own emotions, their own POV, etc.
Taking this to an extreme, Roger Zelzny, in Chronicles of Amber has on occasion whole chapters of a secondary character telling the MC something that happened to them in the past, with no interruptions from the MC. It reads like a complete mini-story, told in first person. You wouldn't find a story told in first person boring, would you? Same here: it works.
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