Reading Too Much Into Narration

Currently I am reading I Am The Messenger, a novel by Markus Zusak. I have read only one other book of his, The Book Thief, which takes place in Nazi Germany and tells the story of a girl who steals books (and, at one point, helps hide a Jew in the cellar). Clearly the two books are significantly different: Messenger is a bout the strange turn Ed Kennedy's mediocre life takes when he finds the ace of diamonds in his mailbox and follows the instructions written on it. The books are equally well-written, but the style and tone differ greatly between them, although sometimes for obvious reasons. The Book Thief has considerable overtones of death because of the setting, particularly in the second half, and many of the later lighthearted moments are full of the knowledge that they could end at any time. Messenger is altogether a less serious book; it has several serious events, but the humour in this book is much more common than in the other. Additionally, more of the serious events in the latter book have positive effects.

The changes in style between the two books, however, are quite notable. When reading The Book Thief, I had thought that it was simply written in the author's usual way. The narration was littered with moments of grimness and reflection, and contained amounts of visual description considered standard for most literature. Messenger has a style inconsistent with that of the other book. Physical description is less specific; the appearances of characters and objects are explained in broad strokes, like Ed's house, which is a "shack", or his friend Ritchie, who has a "man-boyish face". Some characters, like Marv, don't get any physical description and little of any other kind expositionally, despite importance to the story. The largest block of description of a person, apart from Ed's outline of his own character, is this:

"Audrey always sits opposite me, no matter where we play [cards]. She has yellow hair, wiry legs, the most beautiful crooked smile in the world, and lovely hips, and she watches a lot of movies." (15)

Compare that to The Book Thief's Liesel Meminger on her arrival on Himmel Street:

"Upon her arrival, you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands and the frosty blood on her fingers. Everything about her was undernourished. Wirelike shins. Coat hanger arms. She did not produce it easily, but when it came, she had a starving smile.
Her hair was a close enough brand of German blond, but she had dangerous eyes. Dark brown. You didn't really want brown eyes in Germany around that time. Perhaps she received them from her father, but she had no way of knowing, as she couldn't remember him." (31)

Quite a contrast. The reason for this may seem unclear at first, because the narrator of The Book Thief is rarely present at events and easily forgotten. Both books are written in the first person; The Book Thief is narrated by Death himself, Messenger by Ed. Before I continue, I must tell you that I have read many first-person books where the style of narration was standard for the author, not specific to the character--or multiple books by one person where the author always chose the same kind of person to narrate. Zusak's books are different. They are told by very different people, recording the impressions of the character rather than the author--and, most importantly, characterize greatly with a thing as simple as how a person is described. Death, with good reason, sees a lot of things with the overtones of doom that serve as a constant undercurrent to his book. He does a lot of thinking in general, reflects on events and implications with great frequency and depth, and this is the way he talks about everything. Ed, on the other hand, doesn't really look deeply into things. Most of his description is surface impressions; the most in-depth description is of Audrey, who he later admits he's in (unreciprocated) love with, and even his discussion of his own character is fairly superficial. He accepts that his life is mediocre and unremarkable, he assumes that this will not change in the future, and he lives his life accordingly. He is, usually, a passive kind of person.

Of course, at this point I am only halfway into the book, and I do not know that this state of affairs will continue. Ed's life becomes much more interesting when the first ace shows up in the mail, disrupting his pleasantly average existence. Perhaps as the book continues and he follows the instructions on all the aces, his observations of his surroundings will gain more depth. But even without certainty of this happening, it remains clear that Zusak tailors his writing to the views of his characters to a greater degree than is usually seen.

Collectively Unfortunate Impressions

(My writing may sound slightly "off" in this post; I apologize.)

As the reader may or may not be aware, the vignettes that I posted were part of a project assigned to my entire class, though I was one of the few who chose to write fiction. Looking over those vignettes posted by my classmates, I notice a recurring theme: events that were painful, in both the physical and emotional senses. I think I understand the reason for this, actually; the discussion of pain both helps to alleviate it in itself, and allows for commiseration, which also helps. (It also makes for a depressing read in some instances, but let's not go into that.) I take as my first example a vignette by Kathryn Douglas:

"Then my best friend Lex, wasn’t my best friend anymore either. We got into an argument cuz she thought I’d be a good idea to make me jealous of her, but it didn’t turn out too well. They made fun of me, really made me feel like nothing."

Losing friends is an experience common to, I would think, all people, though to avoid making a generalization I'll go with "most". It is generally agreed that said experience is not a pleasant one. Rare is the friendship that drifts apart peacefully; it is more common for them to end in screaming fights, or mockery like that mentioned above. I hesitate to use the word "traumatizing", because it is a rather strong term, but it is definite that the end of a friendship is a painful event. It is also one that tends to imprint itself on one's memory, making it easier to weave a story out of, although this may or may not be a positive thing. An event that might be likened to this one, though the similarities may not be obvious at first, is detailed in Ebone Qualls's first vignette. There she discusses the death of her cousin from cancer, due to that part of the family's rejection of standard cancer treatments. It may seem a bit callous to say that losing a friend through taunts is similar to the death of a relative from cancer, but the labels are in fact only surface identification. The resultant pain of the events is actually quite similar, in that it comes from losing someone close to the author of the vignette.

To further demonstrate my point, let us take a look at the more physical side. The following excerpt comes from the blog of Tony Lin.

"I heard a loud snap, and a second later, I felt like I was just shot with a gun [...] The pain was unbearable it felt as if someone was taking a nail and hammering it into my femur. My leg was throbbing and that wasn’t the worst part."

This, again, is a very memorable event; pain tends to leave an impression which often leads to very detailed memories of events surrounding it. That is probably another reason for this recurring theme; everyone has experienced some sort of pain at some point in their lives. This last example is not greatly similar to the first two, since it does not really point out a loss, apart from a temporary loss of functionality in the aforementioned limb. However, it deserves mention as a demonstration of the general theme of pain going on here.

Another, similar theme, which I have not gone into such detail on, is fear. There is a relationship between pain and fear, not just because they tend to occur close together. They are both extremely memorable, of course, and serve as good sources of anecdotes. In addition to this, fear, like pain, often becomes less of a problem when it can be shared. It doesn't just go away, of course, but at least it gets a little better.

And thus concludes my shoddy analysis.