In January, I read The Man Upstairs, which is yet another early collection of Wodehouse’s short stories. What struck me about these stories as a collection is how they went back and forth between using a first and third person narrator. I am a huge fan of first-person narrators. My favorite novel from my teenage years, Jane Eyre, contains one of the most oft-referenced lines in first person narration (i.e. “Reader, I married him.” This still gives me shivers every time I see it.).
When I write, I prefer to use the first person, which almost feels like an improvisational acting exercise. Getting inside the head of one person and telling a tale is a useful trick for drawing in the reader, because it as though we are being taken into a confidence. The reading experience becomes even more enjoyable for me when the reliability of that narrator is called into question, which happens in The Turn of the Screw or the more recent The Little Stranger (both, interestingly enough, are Gothic novels, but that is something to consider elsewhere). As a reader coping with a narrator with uncertain motivation, I pull back and begin to examine other possibilities. Did, in fact, that person jump to her death, or was she coerced by a supernatural being or was she killed by the narrator?
The most recent first-person escape I went on was The Hunger Games trilogy. Those books are narrated by a girl in her late teens, which is not the most reliable age group for depicting reality in my experience (which is as it should be. Teenagers need to hyper-emote, otherwise they become stunted adults.). Added in to the mix is that Katniss Everdeen is put through some rather extreme situations, meaning that you can toss out any hopes for getting the full picture. The author has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of rebellion, and I have some theories about why those books are particularly popular at this point in time, but in the interests of this blog, what caught my attention most was the amount of emotion that was shown.
If one ever wanted to demonstrate to an alien race the stereotypical emotional landscape of an American young woman (all right, Panem is not exactly the US, but close enough) and a British man, you would do worse than giving them The Hunger Games and My Man Jeeves. Katniss’ emotions leap out at you, in fact, they propel the storyline right up to the end. Concepts like marriage and family loyalty are taken very seriously. One could argue that is because the stakes are literally life and death, although I find that even teenagers who are not fighting to survive tend to take everything Very Seriously (I might have been a case in point). Bertie, and other Wodehouse first person narrators, tend to be bounced around by life’s waves of tumult. They enter into engagements, sometimes accidentally, and seemed resigned to them, and are no less vexed when they are broken. The stakes never include death, merely the loss of face, a butler, or some other prized possession.
I could go on about the historical of the time when both books were written. At the time they were published, just about all of Wodehouse’s readers would have lived through at least one World War, whereas contemporary American readers (with the obvious exception of veterans and returning soldiers) have little experience with war. This is not my point though. What I found to be most interesting was how one form of storytelling can be twisted deftly used to convey early twentieth century insouciance and post-Apocalyptic angst.
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