What's your opinion on using a second character's point of view (using some separate interleaved chapters) to provide the effect of "secretly narrating from a point after all the action is concluded"?
Thanks for this. I'd need to know more. It might read weirdly if they were speaking from different times. That would come across as one footnoting the other, or being snarky because they didn't know obvious stuff. Not un-doable, though.
Thanks, Toby. I’d need to refer to a live serial publication for the example I have in mind, but I’m not here to plug. What you’ve said is useful and sufficient.
Toby’s novel _Patience_ is a lovely example of how this works in practice when done well. The narrator (first person, past tense, a young man trapped in his body by chronic illness) writes with enough time after the novel’s main events to have experienced critical distance, and so the reader is given passages that mix timescales in a pattern that one learns early on and can follow the rest of the book. It goes something like this:
“L happened, thus M, and causing N, which was just like when A to B to C, and although back then I thought D, instead today I decided O and still carry O with me even through X and Y. I was thus able to survive the inevitable P, causing Q, which happened the rest of the next day, until at last R came around, bringing S.”
It swings around and around but the dominant narrative momentum of the LMNOPQR middle sequence of events is the narrative focus, and we have enough glimpse of ABCDE… and …WXYZ that we experience the narrator as a fuller, wiser character.
What's your opinion on using a second character's point of view (using some separate interleaved chapters) to provide the effect of "secretly narrating from a point after all the action is concluded"?
Thanks for this. I'd need to know more. It might read weirdly if they were speaking from different times. That would come across as one footnoting the other, or being snarky because they didn't know obvious stuff. Not un-doable, though.
Thanks, Toby. I’d need to refer to a live serial publication for the example I have in mind, but I’m not here to plug. What you’ve said is useful and sufficient.
Toby’s novel _Patience_ is a lovely example of how this works in practice when done well. The narrator (first person, past tense, a young man trapped in his body by chronic illness) writes with enough time after the novel’s main events to have experienced critical distance, and so the reader is given passages that mix timescales in a pattern that one learns early on and can follow the rest of the book. It goes something like this:
“L happened, thus M, and causing N, which was just like when A to B to C, and although back then I thought D, instead today I decided O and still carry O with me even through X and Y. I was thus able to survive the inevitable P, causing Q, which happened the rest of the next day, until at last R came around, bringing S.”
It swings around and around but the dominant narrative momentum of the LMNOPQR middle sequence of events is the narrative focus, and we have enough glimpse of ABCDE… and …WXYZ that we experience the narrator as a fuller, wiser character.