A narrative technique that I've always loved is when the reader is given a story, a chapter, or some other text without context, but then that context is slowly revealed throughout the rest of the story, such as in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov or The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner.
In Love Medicine, the first chapter is not as inherently difficult to understand as a 999-line poem or a stream of consciousness from a mentally handicapped character, but I found I was having a lot of trouble keeping track of all the characters introduced, as well as their relations to one another. The advantage of introducing so many characters all at once, though, is that the author is then able to provide the reader with first impressions, but then later offer contrary impressions, such as with Nector, who is first introduced as a senile old man before his back story is introduced.
Do you feel that this is an effective tool in preventing the reader from making up his or her mind about a character too early on in the narrative? Or is this technique a recipe for inconsistent and unbelievable characters?
I, too, am a fan of this narrative style. Though it can be confusing at first, I find it to be enriching to forming my own interpretations of the text and a test of my ability to read closely. (I also make good use of the family tree at the beginning of the novel.) I didn't make the connection you did to Nabokov and Faulkner, but I see it now that you mention it. While reading "Love Medicine," I found myself drawing parallels between it and Barbara Kingsolver's "Prodigal Summer." Both novels weave a narrative involving many interconnecting characters with poetic language, specifically about nature.
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ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I'd necessarily say I'm a fan of the style, per se, but I do agree that having each character give their impressions of the other characters offers a nice way for you to get a full sense of who each character is without there being an omniscient presence telling you exactly what to think about each person. Though we know that a first person narrator is unreliable, by presenting multiple unreliable narrators we can sort of get a sense of what the "truth" is about each character by parsing out what's the same from different accounts.
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