English 104 - Introduction to Narrative
Telling it how it Really is:
Telling it how it Really is:
Category: 2 Essay: Carroll, Twain, Faulkner, Sebold | Europa Yang
Europa Yang
12/5/03
Telling it how it Really is:
When wishful thinking causes narrators to misperceive other key characters
In storytelling, the greatest fallibility of the narrator is the tendency to allow personal biases to taint perception. By doing so, the narrator provides the audience with a more subjective and less accurate depiction of what truly occurs. This issue will be explored with the two young and naïve narrators of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Sebold’s The Lovely Bones- Huck and Susie, respectively. Both children develop personal wishes that cater to their happiness and cure their loneliness, yet consequently warp their perception and destabilize their credibility. One way in which these desires lower their credibility is by decreasing the ability of each narrator to truthfully perceive other characters, such as their friends (Duke and King, Ruth) and parental figures (Jim, Susie’s Mom). While these narrators might appear equally biased, Susie allows her desires to de-stabilize her credibility more than Huck does. She maintains the blind hope of remaining a presence that still strongly affects the people she cares for, although she is dead, thereby allowing these unrealistic wishes to consume her thoughts. Meanwhile Huck, who is completely free to pursue his desire for adventure and games, limits the extent to which he fulfills desires by following his logic, an act that can help re-stabilize his credibility.
Sharing a common goal of combating loneliness, Huck and Susie possess distinct personal wishes that ultimately create biases in their perceptions of other characters. The two narrators share interestingly similar situations. Fairly young and lacking a stable family, both wish for the company of parental figures and companions to calm their uneasy sense of loneliness. Huck is an orphan who copes with loneliness by encompassing himself with some sort of adventure or entertainment so as to avoid his fear of “the deadly dull (15)”. He searches for these exciting qualities in the company of characters such as Tom and his gang, the Duke and King, and even Jim, who Huck “was ever so glad to see (for he) “warn’t lonesome, now (53)” on the island. Huck is driven by a desire to satisfy his curiosity and to “run away…and just tramp around the country (39)” preferably with people who also share this interest. In comparison to Huck’s escapist lifestyle, Susie’s situation is very different because her isolation is not at all by choice, but due to the misfortune of being raped and killed. Susie tries to deal with her unbearable loneliness by wishing for the impossible given her trapped situation:
I began to desire more…I wanted to be allowed to grow up, I wanted to live. I could not
have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living…(but) I came to believe that if I
watched closely and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on earth” 19, 20
The combination of her frustration of feeling helpless and her increasing emotional attachment to her family eventually cause her credibility as a reliable narrator to decrease. Huck, while also interested in pursuing his desire, remains more credible because he maintains some restrictions unlike Susie, whose desires are more uncontrolled.
The first comparison of the reliability of these two narrators analyzes the accuracy of Huck’s portrayal of Jim, who serves as a paternal role to the orphan. In terms of adventure and games, Jim’s standpoint is fairly accurately explained by Huck, except in identifying Jim’s motives. While Huck is a boy who is infatuated with obtaining adventure, he can accurately see that Jim is not fitting to be his partner-in-crime: “these kind of things were adventures but Jim said he didn’t want no more adventures. (86)” Yet because Jim is not adventurous, Huck automatically deems Jim as having “a wonderful level head for a nigger. (97)” Due to Jim’s practicality, Huck does not view him with as much excitement as he does with Tom: “Jim, do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing? Not for pie he wouldn’t. He’d call it an adventure. I wish Tom Sawyer was here (77).” Yet Huck’s depiction is incomplete in that it neglects to praise Jim’s bravery as a runaway slave, all because that gutsy act is not part of Huck’s adventures. However Huck can properly differentiate between his attraction for and Jim’s disinterest in adventure, as seen with the incident of discovering the dead body. Huck expresses interest in “studying (the body) and wishing I knowed who shot the man and what they done it for (63)” while Jim does not for fear of ”bad luck.” Likewise, Jim was also “dead against (77)” exploring the steam boat because it made him feel “powerful sick and scared, (77)” which is most likely true because Jim is most afraid of getting caught, not because he is not adventurous- Jim’s clear motive is that “he wouldn’t ever be a prisoner again, not for a salary. (279)” Yet Huck misreads Jim by saying: “Jim couldn’t see no sense in most of it but allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him. (256)” More likely the case, Jim allows the boys and also the Duke to dress him up ridiculously to ensure protection from being caught, not because he thought Huck was smart in this game. While Huck does see Jim in a fairly logical manner, he misses some of the details because he is wrapped up in his own adventure.
A comparable parental figure in The Lovely Bones is Susie’s mother, whom
Susie incorrectly perceives by focusing on herself as reason explaining why her Mother chooses to leave the family. Susie describes from her view from heaven how she has “noticed the signs (151)” of her mother shifting away from the family, making her seem a perceptive and reliable narrator. She attributes this to the trauma her death caused upon her mother: “My mother was moving physically through time to flee from me (152).” Susie highlights how her mother drifted because her parents “were so preoccupied y my absence…my father …would not really look at her … and see the woman he had known her to be before the day they had taken in the news of my death”. Susie also blames herself again for being the burden that caused her Mother to lose her identity as a person: “underneath her smile…were fissures…I didn’t want to (follow them) because I was a child. I grabbed the smile like a prize and entered the land of wonder… (151)” Obviously Susie feels guilty for these two reasons which she believes has caused her mother to depart and has strained the relationship between her parents. Susie causes the reader to adopt her view that “as the firstborn…it was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be. (149)” However Susie neglects to explore the relationship between her father and mother, and whether that was the main impetus for her departure. She only touches upon this by commenting: “They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love” assuming that “apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love…but with them she began to drift. (153)” Her parents could have fallen out of love, but Susie does not notice any of these hints besides saying “my parents no longer slept in the same room together (162)” which was a change from when she was young and heard their love-making after her bath-time. Even after watching their reunification in the hospital and their attempt to rekindle the love they lost, Susie still holds the same feelings. Her strong opinions and guilt taint her perception in explaining why her mother was driven away, reasons that are never clearly given by the mother herself. Besides comparing parental figures, another biased depiction each narrator provides is that of a friend.
Huck’s change in his perception of two friends, the Duke and the King, shows his ability to gain credibility by learning how to improve judgment of these two characters. In their first encounter, Huck is taken away by their adventurous spirit and willingness to do anything for fun, it seems. The “little jobs” done by the King as a pirate ruining a Sunday sermon fondly reminds Huck of the similar job done by his and Tom’s gang to the Sunday school session. Because Huck can sense that Jim will not be his scamming partner, he turns to the Duke and King as his main form of entertainment. At first the duo impress him because of their artistry in developing scams and their authenticity in bringing to life what Huck has only “seen in the books. (21)” Huck is impressed by their Shakespeare rendition, deeming it “beautiful to see, perfectly lovely” although it was fake and amateur acting. Huck also believes the Duke is “uncommon bright” in his game of dressing Jim up to prevent him from being caught. In this instance, Huck’s infatuation with games causes him to fail to see the disrespect towards dressing Jim in this “horrible” way. Despite all of these preliminary infatuations, Huck still manages to correct his opinion of the Duke and King when he witnesses their most immoral scam of pretending to be the Wilks brothers in order to steal the money from the late Peter Wilk. Huck changes by forfeiting his desire for adventure, logically placing his sympathy for the family as more important: “I never see anything so disgusting…it was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race… (178)” “I felt awful bad to see (Mary Jane) cry (178, 198).” Huck rectifies the situation by stealing the money from the Duke and King and completely changes in how he truly perceives the duo: “I don’t want no trouble with their kind. I’d seen all I wanted to of them, and wanted to get entirely shut of them. (227)” While Huck was perhaps fooled by their elaborate and magnificent scams because they seemed to be heroes straight “out of pirate books, and robber books, (21)” he has the flexibility to improve his perception of them because he placed his conscience above his desire for adventure. The other narrator Susie is even less perceptive than Huck because she refuses to allow her rigid desires to change.
Susie’s friend, Ruth serves as the ultimate proof of Susie’s lack of credibility due to her uncontrollable emotions distorting her sense of perception and grasp with reality. Ruth is the one special person left on Earth whom Susie believes she is spiritually connected with. First of all, it is questionable how much Ruth actually is “obsessed (38)” with her as Susie claims she is. It is important to realize that because Susie has the tendency to want people not to forget her, she may be exaggerating the extent to which they are referring to her. This is the case with the moment when Ruth picks up the gloves in the field and Susie haughtily “liked to think she was talking to me. (79)” Susie believes Ruth is mourning for her but can not even distinguish whether Ruth’s concern is because Ruth and Ray were “were observing my death together” or “because he liked her. (202)” Also important, Ruth serves as Susie’s primary connection to Ray, her “one true love”. Because Susie continues to feel so strongly about Ray, she uses Ruth as a facet to help her achieve the impossible dream- the part of her wish to be able to live like a normal child. Although she never says it, Susie is jealous of the closeness that develops between Ray and Ruth, because she was cut off from sharing that with him: “the two of them together…made ray more attractive to me. I would watch ray with a longing different from that which I had for anyone else. A longing to touch and hold him. (81, 224)” It is also highly questionable whether Ruth and Ray really have no sexual feelings for each other in deciding “you can pretend I’m Susie and I will too (201)” when they kissed. The evidence is Ruth’s comment of “Shit…I think I feel something (203) ” indicates that Susie’s jealousy is distorting her narration. Because Susie can never fulfill these desires, she uses Ruth’s body as a physical means for her to have sex with Ray: “I was in her body. I had never been touched like this. I had only been hurt by hands past all tenderness. (304)” This surrealistic transformation of assuming Ruth’s body is not possible and only a false projection of Susie’s deepest wishes, again reinforcing her stubbornness to accept her situation and her unreliability as a narrator.
The main difference between the two is that Huck is able to modify his opinions while Susie remains too engrossed in them to see the truth. While Huck’s perception is sometimes swayed by his desire for adventure, his credibility can actually improve at times when his logic replaces his curiosity as the driving force of his narration. Huck’s criteria for adventure is clearly defined in his own terms- nothing too gory or immoral, and involving himself as part of the heroic act. Therefore, he is able to capture most of the truth in perceiving Jim and the two frauds. For the Duke and King, Huck at first misperceives their characters because he is swept away by their propensity for adventure, yet learns to correct himself by logically formulating his own opinion. However Susie’s escalating frustrations and emotions eventually cause her credibility to deteriorate substantially in comparison to Huck. Her logic is warped and her narration is unreliable as she believes in Franny’s idea that: “All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why-really know-it will come. (19)” Huck is comparatively speaking living a more carefree life, with far more realistic desires that make his pursuit of them easier. Because it is hard for Susie to ever achieve her dreams, her presentation of events and characters is more questionable. For all of these reasons, Huck is a more reliable narrator than Susie.
Taking a closer look at Susie however, it is possible that she may be undergoing a change to become more reliable at the closing of the novel because she finally comes to peace with her inability to achieve her desires. Earlier Susie notes: “the way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them (family) again; it might sound silly, but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it. (27)” Interestingly, it is through the improbable and supernatural phenomenon of assuming Ruth’s body that Susie gains acceptance and realizes that her dreams and desires are impossible to reach: “I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn form me. Though I still would, though they still would, always (318)” and begins to see “things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.” A sign of her maturation of letting the people who used to be in her world go and letting them do the same for her, shows a parallel maturation and development as a narrator. Susie becomes more credible at the very end because she lets go of these fantasies instead of trying to force the impossible upon a world where she finally realizes she no longer has control over.
Posted by eyang on December 09, 2003 at 10:36 AM