Let the Narrator do the Dirty Work

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a voice in your head that could see clearly everything around you and could bear your heavy thoughts, a voice that could lay them out plainly so that you could navigate your life more effectively?

Dog owners believe their canine counterparts provide them with emotional support, compassion, and encouragement.

I prefer cats who perch themselves above everyone else and take pleasure in witnessing the suffering around them.

Which is precisely what readers do. They enjoy witnessing other people’s anguish without feeling the least bit bad about it.

Among all this detached voyeuristic eavesdropping, who’s left to do the hard job of administering understanding and empathy to our characters crushed under their own sorrow and hopelessness?

That would be the narrator, who does the unappreciated job of saying what no one else will, revealing in great detail the character's wretched reality, even when she unappreciatively rejects any clarity offered to her.

Let your hero dismiss the efforts of your narrator, who highlights every critical aspect of his life both within him and without.  The narrator takes him to healthy emotional waters, but can’t make him drink, even if doing so would give him great happiness.

Either way, let your narrator deal with the heavy stuff, your character’s subliminal torture, her unconscious anguish, and her world’s judgement and unrequited acceptance of her, as she is consumed with worry and anxiety, rubbing her face with her hands and wishing she could be anywhere else but in her grandmother’s cramped, hot, kitchen while the potatoes boil on the old gas stove.

The type of narrator who is fully aware of how bad it is around her and how much worse it will be is a deep third-person narrator.

If the narrator acts only as a collective mass of inky agony reflecting the main character’s feelings, meaning the narrator knows and feels only what the character knows and feels, it is a third-person limited narrator.

Either way, give your poor character some relief while your emotional-servant narrator bears and describes the truth for her, which usually isn’t as intense as the character imagines.

If you are having trouble fully expressing what is happening to your precious characters, then let your narrator do it for you.  You can’t expect your characters to respect the narrator if you don’t do it either.

Description/mood/theme

Notice that so far, I haven’t used the words description, mood, or theme.  This is because oftentimes people who are anxious and worried don’t know what to look for to help them solve their troubles.  Most people don’t even know what or why they feel the way they do.  They’re in a forest and can’t discern the difference between the trees and those tall, skinny green creatures with hollow eyes that stare back at them from the dark.

What you need is someone to stand behind you and whisper clarity into your ear, helping to steer and describe your thoughts, and to help you sort through your emotional swirlings so you can say, “Oh, now I understand.”

Provide such a voice for your poor friends in the worlds you’ve created.  It’s the least you can do for them.

Examples of narrators carrying the burdens of truth

Here are examples of the narrator doing the heavy lifting and sorting.  Wouldn’t you like to have such a voice unraveling the confusing parts of life to you in an elegant way?  Let the narrator do such dirty work for your poor characters.  Then, on rare occasions, your characters may listen to it, even if for a moment:

Middlemarch by George Elliot.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.  Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.  We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

So the jubilee was celebrated without the attendance of any members of the family.  Chance had it that it also coincided with carnival week, but no one could get the stubborn idea out of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s head that the coincidence had been foreseen by the government to heighten the cruelty of the mockery.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her intentions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to receive; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she lost all compassion in anger.

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

Gone With the Wind, by Margarete Mitchell

A half-million dollars.  She felt a pang of almost physical sickness at the thought of so much money.  His jeering words passed over her head and she did not even hear them.  It was hard to believe there was so much money in all this bitter and poverty-stricken world.  So much money, so very much money, and someone else had it, someone who took it lightly and didn’t need it.  And she had only a sick elderly husband and this dirty, piddling, little store between her and a hostile world.

The Linking, by J.J. Richardson

The elevator descended until it jolted to a stop on Level 1.  Electric lighting lay strung along one side of the long, abandoned hallway.  As they approached the hangar, their steps became irregular and gritty over the rubble and fallen concrete.  The air in the hangar had turned cold, and Gwynn folded her arms as her stomach froze.  Black earth lay three to five feet thick atop the floor.  Natural light shining through the torn, massive hangar doorway made the scene look more like a cave than the inside of a building.  Hurried along by the MPs, she realized she had yet to tell Marc goodbye.

I would love it if some enchanted companion were to lay out and organize my thoughts so I could evaluate them effectively and improve my life accordingly.  What a superpower to possess!

To describe is to feel.  To highlight is to relate.  Have your narrator ignore the menial parts in your story and emphasize and encourage what is most important.

Your characters often won’t know what to describe and keep track of, so let your narrator do the dirty work.  This way, your readers will feel as awful as your characters and will therefore want to keep buying and reading your books.