Getting inside the head of your characters

So often students write in their commentaries that they switch from third person to first person so they can really be inside the head of their character. But that is not altogether a wise position to take up as an author. Let us assume that as an author you have complete control over the minds and actions of your characters. Actually, I suspect that authors are not always in that control position and I’ll deal with that possibility in another blog. But if for the moment you are in complete control, why do you need to use the first person? Third person free indirect discourse gives you far more control.
David Lodge in his book, Consciousness and the Novel (Penguin 2004) points out that fiction is the only place where you can know what is going on inside the heads of other people. In real life, we can listen to other people but we have no idea if what they are telling us is actually what they are thinking. Even a psychiatrist, skilled in persuading a client to reveal their innermost thoughts, can’t actually know what their client is thinking. But in a novel or story, the third person narrator knows everything and can claim to be more reliable than a first person narrator because the third person narrator is outside the story but the first person narrator is only one of many characters within the story. Admittedly, the author is in control of both a third and a first person narrator, and both first and third person narrators can be unreliable if the author wants them to be.
On the whole a third person narrator can explain what is going on in the head of one of the author’s characters more reliably than the character can do so in the first person. Using David Lodge’s example of how third person narrator’s work, I’ll add the first person so that we can see the different ways at the disposal of an author. Lodge takes Cinderella at the ball as an example.
1st and 3rd Person direct discourse: As the clock struck twelve I/Cinderella thought:”I am going to be late and I will get into trouble.”
1st and 3rd Person reported speech: As the clock struck twelve I/Cinderella thought that I/she was going to be late and that I/she would get into trouble.
3rd Person free indirect discourse: The clock struck twelve. She would be late and would get into trouble.
Notice how it is only in the last example that there is no need to use the word “thought” because the narrator has got out of the reader’s way by aligning themselves with the character. They don’t have to report the character’s thoughts: the narrator in fact has disappeared, or to coin a well-known phrase from Roland Barthes, it’s not the author that is dead, but the narrator. Third person indirect discourse gives the author/narrator far more power.
Now how does the scenario change if you are writing memoir or memoir-based fiction? I’ve been thinking about this the last few days as I am in Johannesburg as I write this and have just done a workshop with education students at Wits University on turning memoir into short fiction. I guess if you are writing memoir, you should know what is inside your head, but actually it may be as fictional as fiction. I had an example of this not long ago in my own poetry which is often memoir-based. I showed a poem based on a childhood memory to my sister who promptly replied: “That happened to me, not you!” As far as the poem goes, it didn’t matter who the experience belonged to, but it wasn’t very good for sisterly relationships, especially as she was writing poetry herself at that time. Of course, these issues refer more to content than to writing style, and I dealt to some extent with content issues in a recent blog on fact and fiction. But it does make me think that maybe memoir should be written in the third person, so that you as author, can become a third person narrator in your own story. That way you might come closer to getting inside your own head.
Image Credit: Anthony Carey