Self-Knowledge in Fiction

How much self-knowledge does the writer bestow on their main character(s)? In a detective novel, clearly the flatfoot must start off with very little information, or there wouldn't be much of a plot to unravel. If the gentle reader ever solves the clues ahead of the 'Tec, then the novel is a busted flush. But I'm really posing the question of literary fiction.

What type of narrator does the reader yearn for to lead them through the world of that particular novel? A reliable narrator, whose trusty eyes they can bank on for transmitting all scenes, or an unreliable one, with whom the reader is playing cat and mouse as to the veracity of what is being imparted. In the case of the former, whereby the reader consigns themselves wholly into the care of the reliable narrator, how much self-awareness does the character possess? If the novel is a process of revelation and a journey to self-awareness in the character, the reader can only suckle knowledge at the permitted drip-feed rate. The reader has very little independence of thought, can scarce escape the plodding velocity of the character arc that leads them by the nose. The reliable and self-aware narrator is just too too omniscient, too inviolable. The reader can gain very little by viewing through such self-assured eyes. But in such cases, you scare have a journey worth undertaking in the first place.

So to the unreliable narrator. The one who you cannot take their word or their world view as sacrosanct. There are plenty of reasons for a narrator being an unreliable tour guide throughout the novel. They might be deliberately playing with the reader. They might be deluded in their perceptions of the world around them, Jane Austen's "Emma" Woodhouse is a classic example of this latter type. She is chock full of knowledge about manners and propriety, yet she cannot see the love of the man in closest proximity to her. Okay, forgive me now for a great blasphemy, but in the early 21st Century I don't really want to concern myself with writing a book of manners. Besides there's no such thing as propriety any more is there? That in itself is something that interests me enough to want to explore it.

So how can you have a self-aware, but unreliable narrator? Surely they are mutually exclusive? If the narrator is ultimately deluded, how self-aware can they be said to be? Returning briefly to the character arc notion above, of the book as slow-release character self-insight, working from the externality of the character's situation and boring inwards, ever inwards until their true essence is obtained, to me this precisely mirrors the onion layers of unpeeling, that forms the praxis of the psychotherapy couch. Me, I like to plunge the reader straight inside the head of my narrator. A crash landing amongst all the built up mess of sensibilities and predilections already set in place within the character. (For at the beginning of the novel, they are adult and fully formed already, not some unworked marble awaiting the plot's chisel to transmogrify them). From there, their self-awareness allows them to cast back into how they got there, but also into the environment around them that dictates their current fate. From the internal reaching back out towards the external. For I am interested in relationship. To others, to institutions, to society, to forces unknown. The actual nature of connection. My characters try and grapple with those connections that are submerged from plain view. The ones that underlie where they find themselves in the world. The power dispositions predicating all relationships. For that I demand self-aware and perceptive characters. They know who they are already; what they try and penetrate is how they stand in relation to those others they encounter in the novel.

Yet that doesn't make them omniscient and omnipotent. The loom of those very same forces into which they thread themselves, may completely strip them of the ability to use their knowledge to free themselves. In my novel "A,B&E" I have one character who knows everything about her current plight, but struggles to kick against the pricks in order to liberate herself from her societal exile. The epigraph I used for that novel comes from Steve Tesich's novel "Karoo": "Saul knows everything, except what to do with what he knows". In my novel "G", I have a character again well positioned in terms of insight, but shackled by the sectarianism of Northern Irish culture and being a Mother at a time when the men of violence are decommissioned back into the domestic realm. Her 'character arc' is reacting to these new dynamics, while both shielding and encouraging the development of her young daughters. Then there is a character who is monitoring the authorities who have mounted a siege of her community. Again, well versed on her dilemmas, but restricted as to action by the external situation in which she finds herself. In "Not In My Name", the main character is a terrorist, so for all his full inhabiting of 'normalcy', the character is in fact a willfully unreliably narrator (as against Emma Woodhouse being unconsciously unreliable). The knowledgeable mosaic spun by the character, is in fact a tissue of lies from beginning to end. He does play with and manipulate the reader's sensibilities. He is the most unreliable and knowledgeable of narrators and he throws down the gauntlet to you the gentle reader.

Thus full knowledge of characters is not necessarily enough to save them in the course of the novel. There are plenty of fissures within their character that degrades the full value of their supposed knowledge. They have perception, but they also have countervailing emotions and sensibilities. It is all determined by their relations both to others specifically and society in general. The lacuna between thought and action that afflicts most of our species. In short, they eschew simplistic characterisation and the dreaded arc that can be plotted on a graph.

Do people in real life really have character changes? Unless they find God, not all that much. We are creatures of emotional habit. We repeat the same behaviour patterns as the head quacks tell us endlessly. That's why I don't really buy into novels of drip-feed revelation, but seek to offer a different dynamic. They possess a level of observation that does demand some reciprocity of perception in the reader. In short, they challenge you the reader, challenge your world view, maybe even goad you a tad, but they are not so invulnerable that the reader cannot feel there is no room to strike back, to unpick the stray seams of the narrator. And probably to feel delight in doing so. To give as good good, if not better as you get from the character laid out in two-dimensional print, but who inhabits the three-dimensions (and possibly more) of your imagination.

Self-knowledge in characters mirrors the mechanism of knowledge in the reader, that which presumably impels a reader to pick up a book and outline the voice of the author silently inside their own head in the first place...