Free A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane Page B

being that of the character Nick. In the first sentence, only the voice of the narrator can be heard. In the second, third, and fourth sentences, that same voice is heard again. In those three sentences, however, the voice of the narrator reports not only his own observations but sensations and insights of the character himself, and when these two are reported the language seems not only the narrator’s but partly that of the character. The discerning reader might even notice a gradual change in the viewpoint from sentence to sentence. The first sentence reports only what might be seen of the character. Later sentences move more closely, as it were, towards the character’s own viewpoint, and the final exclamation seems so much in keeping with the character that it might have been enclosed within quotation marks. By this time, the narratorwho seemed, only moments earlier, to be addressing us in his own voice has seemed to fall silent.
    I would estimate that rather more than half the fiction published during my lifetime is written from a point of view hardly different from that of the passage quoted above and seems to be told by a narrator claiming to know all that is known to the chief character but not much more. By this I mean that if the narrator were reporting the visit of the chief character to a certain hotel, he or she (the narrator) would not usually inform the reader that the hotel had been the site, a hundred years before, of the founding of a certain political party or of a notorious murder if the chief character was unaware of such matters. Not only have I read much fiction of the sort quoted but I have myself sometimes written such fiction and not wanted afterwards to repudiate it. This sort of fiction provides its readers with an experience not unlike what I felt when I stood confused among the concentric box hedges and gravel paths. I was not lost or in any sort of danger. Even if I had not been able to plot a path outwards through the hedges, I could have scrambled over them or through them and could have got back to my room whenever I chose. For as long as I limited my thinking, however; for as long as I observed what I supposed were the conventions of gardens and their designers; for as long as I felt bound to walk only on designated pathways and forbidden from breaking through even a miniature hedge, then I seemed truly a captive of the artifice and of whoever had designed it, even though I could look away at any time from the petty labyrinthand outwards towards the far-reaching countryside or upwards towards this massive building and its numerous windows.
    I have not wanted to repudiate any fiction of mine the narrator of which has the viewpoint described above, but I have wanted, for almost as long as I have been a writer of fiction, to secure for myself a vantage-point from which each of the events reported in a work of fiction such as this present work, and each of the personages mentioned in the work, might seem, at one and the same time, a unique and inimitable entity impossible to define or to classify but also a mere detail in an intricate scheme or design. I might have written instead of the previous sentence that I have for long wanted to call into being a fictional narrator by definition more knowledgeable and more trustworthy than a personage such as myself, the narrator of this present work.
    I have been sometimes dissatisfied with the sort of narration in which the thoughts and feelings of the chief character alone are reported. (‘Nick rubbed his eye...’) I have sometimes felt concerned that such fiction diminishes the importance of the narrator. The undiscerning reader of such fiction might well suppose himself or herself merely to be witnessing one after another event, so to call it, in the life, so to call it, of the chief character in almost the way that the viewer of a film supposes himself or herself to be witnessing actuality, so to call it. And yet, this sort of