Dissecting Fiction

A friend of mine freely bandies around the distinction between art as presented by media such as television and movies, and art as presented by the written word. In movies, this person argues, one can only watch the actions of the characters; just as in real life, one can never know what they're thinking--one can only surmise.

In writing, on the other hand, the reader may be told what the character is thinking. In Flannery O'Connor's story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the first sentence states flatly, "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida." No guesswork for the reader there; no assumption about the grandmother's feelings need be drawn from her behavior.

For another example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, This Side of Paradise, Amory is talking to his best friend, Tom, about the girl he loves:

          "She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now."
          He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.
          "Oh, Golly, Tom!"

The first sentence tells us nothing we can believe; it's simply Amory's report about his feelings, and we can only accept it until provided with evidence one way or the other. The difference between belief and acceptance is subtle, but important.

The author's report that Amory 'felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid' gives us a report about the world, not about the character, odd as that may seem. The 'He felt' is a mere statement of fact. However, in choosing the noun 'quiver' to describe the tear, the author ascribes a certain response to the character: he doesn't have just a tear on his eyelid--he feels the quiver of that tear. In this case, I would submit that the author's word choice impels an emotional interpretation, not just of, but about the character, which in turns provokes a sympathetic response from the readers. We feel for the character because we feel what he feels. Whereas in the O'Connor example, the author blatantly tells us the grandmother didn't want to go to Florida, Fitzgerald leaves us to discover for ourselves Amory's feelings, which seems to me to make the experience much more personal.

Which brings us back to the difference between being shown feelings and being told about them. In the last sentence of the example from Fitzgerald, the author himself italicizes the second word, giving it much more emotional weight than the other words of the sentence, and follows the sentence by an exclamation point, giving the whole sentence much more emotional weight than the sentences preceding it. It says nothing about Amory's emotional state--but it leads us to infer much. In the same way, it seems to me that when we're presented with a scene from either the big screen or the small, we have to make an empathic leap of faith as to what the character is feeling, just as we must in life. The question is which method gives us a better understanding of the human condition.

However, the drawback to being shown emotional states instead of experiencing them is that human beings are so complicated that we can be in multiple states of emotions at one and the same time. Conflicting emotions happen often: I want that second piece of pie, but I want to lose another pound. A scene must show us a character not eating a piece of pie, but it must also make sure we know the reasons why.

(A final thought on subtlety: in O'Connor's story, the grandmother is never named, and so could be anyone's grandmother; in Fitzgerald's story, the main character is named for the Latin word for 'love.' Which is the more evocative?)