On the narrators and
characters we love, those we don’t, and the value of both.
This spring I get
to teach for the second time a really interesting upper-level lit seminar: the
American Novel, 1950 to the Present (sequel to a pre-1950 novel course I’ve
taught a few times as well). I had a lot of fun with it the first time, but I
have to admit that one particular aspect was a serious disappointment: I was
greatly looking forward to my first time teaching Sylvia
Plath’s The Bell-Jar (1963), especially
to a class of junior and senior English majors (given the age, literary
interests and voice, and sarcastic temperament of Plath’s narrator); but the
majority of them (at least those who voiced their opinions) didn’t like Plath’s
novel. Or, more exactly, they didn’t like that narrator/protagonist Esther—and if
you don’t like the first-person narrator of a novel that’s as focused on that
narrator’s perspective, experiences, and identity as Plath’s is, you’re in for
a long unhappy read.
Never one to let
an opportunity for discussion and analysis pass us by, I made that unhappiness
part of our class conversations—especially because many students had similarly
negative takes on another narrator-protagonist, Calliope in Jeffrey
Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002); and
yet they seemed as a group to like two other, potentially controversial
narrators: “Tim O’Brien” in O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried (1990) and Yunior in Junot Díaz’s The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). There are lots of ways to
analyze those different responses, including inescapable elements of gender and
sexuality—Esther and Calliope foreground those themes in ways that (it seems to
me) made my students uncomfortable. But it’s also the case that O’Brien and
Yunior are novelist-narrators,
overtly writing books that are focused in large part on characters other than
themselves—and perhaps in that case we’re more willing to accept and appreciate
their flaws and challenges than we are when the narrators are telling their own
stories.
In any case, the
discussions and analyses will continue this semester—not only because all four
of those novels remain on the syllabus, but because I’ve added another with a narrator
and main character who’s even more unlikeable than any of them: Patrick Bateman
in Bret
Easton Ellis’ American Psycho
(1991). Not only have I never taught Ellis’ novel before, but I’ve never read
it all the way through; so this will be a learning experience for the professor
as well as the students (and I’ll be sure to keep you posted!). But even if we
all hate Bateman and/or the novel, I think there’ll be significant value in the
experience—because the things that don’t work for us have just as much as to
teach us, both about themselves and about our own perspectives and preferences,
as the ones that we love. I’m excited to see how this next group of students
respond and what we all can learn together in the process.
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What’s on your
spring calendar?
No comments:
Post a Comment