The Beauty of Narration

By: Sean Savoie 

            Before beginning my somewhat pedantic article about narration, I would love to share a definition of love as expressed in an email by one of my favorite students of all time, young Master Sean Chen, who, despite the nature of his addition to our collection of love types, reads good fiction whenever he can.

            Sean Chen writes:

            "No life Love - Love of games, games, and, of course, games."

That is seriously a good addition because I love video games.  So much so, I think I'll play games until I'm dead.  Everyday, when I come back from school, the first thing I want to make sure of is whether my dear computer is okay, and then open a program and start clicking away furiously.  No life Love is just like an obsession. Oh yeah, that reminds me: "Obsessed love - So obsessed you think its love."

There are too many quotes about love so I'll just paste the URL: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Love#Love 

Having written over 100 articles about developing strong essays of many types for the academic world, I now feel compelled to discuss my favorite form of the written word: novels of fiction. I live for such books. With music included in the deal, being locked away in solitary confinement for 50 years in the Flushing Public Library would be a true blessing. I am never alone with a good book.

            As a master painter or music composer can capture and depict feelings and portray the general aura of a time in history, a powerful writer of fiction may go far beyond the limitations inherent in the other disciplines of expression by taking the reader deep into the mind of a character. A reader may find him or herself propelled straight into the action of a well-crafted story.

            Narration is the mode of development that allows people to communicate with others in everyday life. Hopes, dreams, fears, concerns, disappointments, successes, and an unlimited number of human qualities are expressible when relating an account of something that has occurred in the form of a story. This is the most fundamental and ancient medium used for history, and rightly so, because our power as human animals lies in our language. If formally educated or self-educated, a person has immense power using the spoken or written word. The pen is mightier than the sword! And so, in the next few articles we will take a deeper look into the world of fiction and then explore how narration may be put to use as a powerful mode of development in an academic essay.

            I often feel sorry for people who do not take time to read for pleasure. Having read books for my own satisfaction and curiosity from a very young age, I wonder just how much a relentless video-gamer or television addict is missing. No video game, television program, or movie has ever come close to matching the wildly vivid world of my imagination, which plays in my mind in the form of dreams while I am sleeping and while reading excellent books when awake. I regard this as one of the greatest gifts of my life and can only lament the fact that fewer and fewer Americans are reading each year.

            As a writing teacher, my job is primarily that of maximizing the potential of each student and inspiring that student to push beyond the ordinary. For this reason, I am constantly searching for the key techniques employed by the authors whom I admire. Some writers use numerous adjectives to describe the setting of a scene in a book, but they do not at all succeed in creating a mental image for me; others bring me straight into the scene with few, if any, adjectives. Take the following paragraph from the book A Prayer for Owen Meany, by one of my favorite authors, John Irving, as an example: 

            Lewis Merrill, forever in the company of the sour stamina that radiated from his wife, was also in the company of his troubled children; often rebellious, almost always unruly, uniformly sullen, the Merrill children acted out there displeasure at being dragged to an amateur theatrical. The tallish boy, the notorious cemetery vandal, sprawled his legs into the center aisle, indifferently creating a hazard for the elderly, the infirm, and the unwary. The middle child, a girl – her hair so brutally short, in keeping with her square, shapeless body, that she might have been a boy – brooded loudly over her bubble gum. She had sunk herself so low in her seat that her knees caused considerable discomfort to the neck of the unfortunate citizen who sat in front of her. He was a plump, mild, middle-aged man who taught something in the sciences at Gravesend Academy; and when he turned round in the seat to reprove the girl with a scientific glance, she popped a bubble at him with her gum. The third and youngest child, of undetermined sex, crawled under the seats, disturbing the ankles of several surprised theatergoers and coating itself with a film of grime and ashes – and all the manner of muck that the patrons had brought in upon their winter boots. 

            John Irving, even out of context with the story, creates a visual scene by making use of a wide variety of verbs to depict actions that require the reader to picture the scene. In the above paragraph, it is impossible to imagine the smallest child crawling under the seats without imagining the seats. This type of description creates a setting by depicting the characters in relation to the setting. There is no need to describe the seats. The reader, in imagining the scene, must also imagine some type of seat. For some, these may be beige folding chairs, for others, standard felt-cushioned theater seats. Regardless, the author has succeeded in playing directly to the imagination of the reader, who, in turn, develops a keener and more colorful imagination. The beauty of descriptive narration, as opposed to visual art, video games, and movies, is that the audience, the reader, is required to create the mental image for him or her self, causing this fortunate participant to strengthen the imagination.