Did you do your homework?
Looks at you over the top of his glasses.
Tuts.
Don’t worry, you can do it now, or after reading this, or sneak shyly away at the end of class.
Yesterday, I asked you to read George Saunders’ story ‘The End of FIRPO in the World’.
The aim was for you to identify what is the narrator’s language, what Cody’s and what is shared between them. Plus, what belongs to someone else.
I suggested printing the story out and using highlighter pens or underlining.
So, let’s do some picking apart, some listening to our sensitive spine.
Here’s the opening paragraph of ‘FIRPO’.
It contains racist and offensive language. That’s a notable part of what we’re going to be discussing. —
The boy on the bike flew by the chink’s house, and the squatty-body’s house, and the house where the dead guy had rotted for five days, remembering that the chink had once called him nasty, the squatty-body had once called the cops when he’d hit her cat with a lug nut on a string, the chick in the dead guy’s house had once asked if he, Cody, ever brushed his teeth.
Why this story is so useful is that the gap between narrator and Cody’s language is dramatically there within the first ten words.
Imagine if George Saunders, a notoriously nice man, wrote a straight non-fiction piece in the New Yorker referring to his neighbour as ‘the chink’.
He just wouldn’t do it. And so we’re almost immediately forced to attribute that language to someone else — someone far more offensive.
Take a bow, Cody.
Cody is ‘The boy on the bike’. We learn this detail by the end of the paragraph, when we read the deliberately awkward words, ‘if he, Cody’.
Yet aggressively vulgar Cody, as we meet him, isn’t thinking of himself as ‘The boy’. That’s a distanced, external view of him. So we can be sure that language comes from the narrator — a very close third person narrator (at least until the end of the story). And I can put those words, and all the narrator’s words, in italics.
Also belonging to the narrator is the phrase ‘on a bike’. Why should Cody’s head be conscious of the bike? He’s not reacting to its sudden appearance or reappearance. He’s been on it a while. He’s riding around. He’s not self-consciously narrating himself to someone else who doesn’t know he’s on a bike, or who needs to know what kind of bike he’s on.
He’s not doing what Jarvis Cocker sings about in ‘I Spy’ —
And it’s just like in the old days
I used to compose my own critical notices in my head
“The crowd gasps at Cocker’s masterful control of the bicycle
Skillfully avoiding the dog turd outside the corner shop.”
Here, ‘bicycle’ is necessary.
If you were to get on a bike now, and ride for ten minutes, you might possibly still be thinking ‘I’m riding a bike’ but you wouldn’t be thinking ‘I’m a [whatever-kind-of-person-you-are] riding a bike’.
Cody both does and doesn’t think of himself as a boy. That’s one of the cruxes of the story.
The words ‘flew by’ seem to me quite literary. They are good external descriptive writing. But when did you ever hear an American boy of Cody’s age use ‘flew’ in that slightly old-fashioned way?
I flew down to the 7/11 to get me some Doritos.
Doesn’t fit. Hardly less than —
I alighted from my bicycle upon reaching said establishment.
Why does Saunders phrase it like this?
What usually flies by?
Time.
Time is flying by for Cody, although he’s unaware of it.
If you read Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, you’ll see this is just the kind of verbal detail he picks out from his beloved Russian short stories. (Although there remains always the issue that they may have used a similar phrase, but they didn’t use those exact words, because they wrote in Russian, and we’re reading a translation.)
As an aside, Cody’s name always reminds me of the Mogwai album song ‘Cody’ and the album it’s from, which unpicks the initials of his name into ‘Come On Die Young’.
These aren’t spoilers, because I’m assuming by now you’ve done your homework.
All of the words so far,
The boy on the bike flew by the
come from the narrator’s vocabulary and sensibility, as far as we know them.
With the abrupt splurge of chink, we hit the first bit of pollution we can attribute Cody.
For a brief moment, we flip into and out of Cody’s head.
There’s still an element of narration to chink, and squatty body, and dead guy — a little bit of expositional work — because just as Cody may not be thinking the word bike as he rides his bike, he may not be thinking of those nicknames as he goes past flies houses.
Although the writing is very live, it isn’t stream of consciousness. (Another subject.)
What the spurting out into the narrative of those nicknames says to the reader is —
This is how Cody would say it, if he were saying it.
The overall impression given by this is that Cody is so irrepressible, such a strong character, that he can’t be kept out of this account of this period of time of his life.
And there, now that we’ve reached this point, you have the demonstration of Free Indirect Narration I was aiming for.
From this point, the experienced reader knows that the telling of this story will be shared between the responsible narrator, who will contribute the clear overall flow, and the irresponsible Cody, who will drop in the occasional turd of sensibility, and will also sway the rhythm and the syntax.
Together they’ll make up the polluted river that is ‘The End of FIRPO in the World’.
In other uses of Free Indirect, in other stories, the character’s pollution could come from, say, a pleasant, perfumed sensibility and vocabulary. And the narrator could be more distinctively themselves, rather than — as here — a good, responsible, slightly neutral storyteller. For example, you can easily include Free Indirect within a powerfully idiosyncratic, even idiolectic Scots or Jamaican Patois narrative voice.
Rather than go through the rest of the paragraph word by word, I’ll just pick out a couple of things.
I’m not sure whether to attribute ‘the’ to the narrator or Cody. But so I have left it plain, to indicate it’s shared. A question mark might be added.
Same with ‘house’. As you pass one, do you think ‘the house’ or ‘house’ or ‘that house’ or nothing at all? Debatable. If the word were ‘dump’, I’d give it to Cody.
It is very easy to detect the literary tone of a work-doing phrase like ‘remembering that’.
Even more literary is the use of complex grammatical construction such as ‘had once asked if he’.
Never in his short life has Cody ever thought or said or written ‘had once if asked if I’.
Finally, the words ‘ever brushed’ and ‘teeth’ are reported speech. There’s a lot of that, coming up, and it passes through Cody’s memory into the narrative. But the words Cody was asked weren’t about ‘his’ teeth but ‘your’ teeth. The narrator makes that change.
If you started out unsure of how to detect Free Indirect, how to bring your Spidey Sense into play, I hope this has been a useful demonstration.
If you’re teaching Free Indirect, I hope this gives you some materials or ideas.
Maybe avoid the turd in the river image, but I think it makes the point, and is topical.
Here’s the rest of the paragraph —
The boy on the bike flew by the chink’s house, and the squatty-body’s house, and the house where the dead guy had rotted for five days, remembering that the chink had once called him “nasty”, the squatty-body had once called the cops when he’d hit her cat with a lug nut on a string, the chick in the dead guy’s house had once asked if he, Cody, “ever brushed” his “teeth”.